CHARLES E. RAVEN

Christian Communalism

title of the original English version printed: Paul and the Gospel of Jesus -
Study of the Basis of Christian Ethics

(English version)
http://www.oocities.org/projetoperiferia4/paul.htm

(Portuguese version still in translation phase)
http://www.oocities.org/projetoperiferia4/paulo.htm

http://www.oocities.org/projetoperiferia

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Epilogue

IN This book Dr Raven gives his answers to two crucial questions. What was Jesus's message, in its abiding essence? Did St Paul corrupt it --- or (as Dr Raven believes) was St Paul led on by his own experience to understand with a magnificent new breadth the revolutionary, implications of Jesus for the life of the world, implications which have been, given a new urgency by the spiritual crisis of humanity in the 20th century?
This book sums up a lifetime's thought by one of the best known authors and preachers in modem Britain. Dr Raven was Regius Professor of Divinity, Cambridge, from 1932 to 1950, and served as Vice-Chancellor of the University. He has also been Chaplain to the Crown since 1919, and is a Fellow of the British Academy. Specializing in the relations between religion and science, he has never been afraid to challenge conventional orthodoxy. In this book he is characteristically bold in taking us back to the origins of the Christian way of life.

1 The Phenomenon of Man, p. 296.

1 Cf. Mark 3.21 and 31-5, and his visit to Nazareth (6.1-5).

1 Von Reimarus zu Wrede, translated with the title The Quest of the Historical Jesus.

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solidarity. Jesus had come to his own, even as the prophets had foretold. In him God had 'visited his people'. The expected hope of Israel and of all nations had been fulfilled. And the result was Calvary. The best representatives of his contemporaries, the two most respected of their institutions, the Sanhedrin of the people of God acting through the priesthood and the rabbinate, and the imperial justice of Rome in the person of its procurator, had combined to crucify the Christ. Judged by their standards, he was only one more deluded revolutionary who was misleading his followers and might involve the holy land in bloodshed and destruction. They could slay and expect to forget. But, for the disciples who had known and seen and believed, their easy action meant the betrayal and ruin of Israel, the end of their world, the birth of a new way of life, a new love to unite them, a new community to integrate them, a new outlook and full knowledge to inspire them. As they received at Easter the assurance of his living presence, and at the Ascension the knowledge of his divine status, so at Pentecost they found the eternal life which was given as they reached the abundant life of his ministry, and the life through the death of self of his crucifixion. For them, as for the world, it was a new creation; the old had passed away. That was the significance of Gethsemane.

Too often perhaps our interpretation of his Passion is in terms of his sufferings, the sheer torture and heartbreak that the sequence of his agony involves. Surely the suffering that he by his choice of submission was bound to bring upon his disciples, the shock of his arrest, the shame of their betrayal, the disappointment of their dreams, the loss of their love, the end of their contact, the triumph of his foes, the failure of his mission -- their agony, unconsoled by his presence or his certainty of God, has its own bitterness for him as for them, Gethsemane is the evidence of it; and when the ultimate

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conflict of loyalties has been resolved, 'nevertheless not my will but thine be done" remains the verdict.

With the details of the trial, its date with regard to the Passover, its sequence and legality and the precise constitutional powers of the Sanhedrin under Roman rule, of the interlude with Herod, and the character and motives of Pilate, we are not here specially concerned. In any case, as Jesus had chosen to abide the issue and was in no position to challenge the state's authority, the highly complex modem problems of the Christian's relationship to nominally Christian secular governments do not arise. And the fascinating and very important question of the attitude of the Pharisees and other Jews who had been interested in Jesus to the attack upon him will be discussed later. It suffices to note that the authorities were unable to find secondary grounds for their condemnation and had to submit the basic question. 'Are You the Messiah, Son of the Blessed?' In reply Jesus not only affirmed his Messialiship but explained it by quoting Daniel (7.13) on the Son of man's status and advent. On this charge which represents his basic claim for his mission he was condemned by the midnight meeting and sent up to the Procurator by the official session of the Sanhedrin -- the charge being modified for the Roman trial into one of Kingship and therefore treason against the Emperor. The soldiers' mockery and the inscription on the Cross bear out that this was the verdict. Crucifixion, the death regarded by the Jews as specially accursed, was the recognized penalty.

On the Cross itself, as the records and the mature experience of Christendom agree to affirm, the good news reaches its full significance, and the 'mystery', the open

Mark 14.36. I like to think that those words were preserved for us by the lad in the 'linen cloth' (Mark 14.51-52). He may well have been the evangelist in whose mother's house the Last Supper had been held: cf. Acts 12.12.

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secret of the paradox of life with God in the world, is revealed. We have seen it hitherto in terms of the relationship between Jesus and his environment. He, unique in this among all sons of men, lived eternally, that is in an unbroken union with the divine as Son with Father. He lived too in this world of time and space, of multiform individualities, a man among men, and showed how these diverse units could be lifted above the normally conflicting egoism and altruism of their own natures. Here was the mutuality, the atoned life, the Way of the new beatitude which has ever since Jesus been accepted as the quality of God himself. It is love -- but love that has risen above our limitations of exploitation and of sentimentality, love which neither dominates nor idealizes. love wholly free from sadism and from masochism.

In us, and in Jesus, self-fulfilment and self-surrender have each its place: to become complete the egoistic and the altruistic motives must be integrated not by the suppression of one or the other but by their integration. Unity and diversity, the old problem of the one and the many which was the basic issue of Greek philosophy, must be resolved. The story of evolution from atom to molecule, from molecule to cell, from the unicellular to the multicellular, provides a series of examples of the same process, and at least suggests that at the human level in what Teilhard de Chardin calls 'hominization' a similar achievement is attainable.

Here in the one great word recorded by St Mark the cry of dereliction 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' we are shown the moment when the tension is broken. It is at once the utterance of total loneliness, of the surrender of the ultimate assurance of the divine presence; and thereby the means to and the endorsement of the final triumph. Here is fulfilled the paradox of life lost and gained, of the saying of Jesus most often repeated in the records of him. Death which is, or seems, the absolute isolation of the ego is thus 'the gate

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of life', the liberation into the love-relationship in which egoism and altruism are one.

For the word itself is of course a quotation from the prophetic poem which we call Psalm 22 and so along with its heart-break and seeming defeat involves the splendour and fulfilment of eternal life. In the traditional sequence of the Seven Words from the Cross, arranged from the Gospels in a perfect pattern, the whole is seen as the dramatic presentation of the love personified in the Crucified and expressed in them. Here is love that forgives, and abides, and unites; that gives to the uttermost and giving receives; that can therefore appeal, and succeed, and be fulfilled. It is the dramatic crisis and summary of the ministry of Jesus, of his life which to his foes seemed to end at the Cross but of which in fact the Cross was the central point. It is the life that finds its fulfilment in Pentecost, the fulfilment which is still working itself out in the blessed community, his risen Body.

For although neither St Mark's Gospel nor the source common to St Matthew and St Luke give details of the appearances nothing is more certain than that very shortly after his burial the disciples were convinced beyond doubt that Jesus was alive and with them. In an era which had no language that could distinguish psychic from physical experience and in a matter unprecedented it is difficult for us to determine the precise events which established their conviction. But those events changed their whole outlook and characters, and have been repeated with a strong degree of similarity from St Paul's experience on the way to Damascus throughout history. We are not here concerned with a detailed discussion of them, still less of the occasion which we call the Ascension which apparently manifested to them the divine status of Jesus. Suffice that St John's story of the three occasions which for him are typical of the event represent the adequacy of Jesus to meet the loneliness of the

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broken-hearted, the bewilderment of the defeated, and the doubtings of the sceptical (John 20.11-29).

What is more immediately relevant is the manifestation at Pentecost of a new type of human community, a fellowship of which it was said that 'the whole number were of one heart and soul' (Acts 4.32) and by St Paul that they were 'one body in Christ Jesus and each severally its members' (1 Cor. 12.27). In this body men and women, sharing the same loyalty, dedicated to the common service, and united by mutual love, achieved an organic solidarity which enabled them individually and corporately to express and fulfil the way of Christ -- or, rather, to provide for him an instrument by which his will might be accomplished. The symbol and instrument thus created was indeed the end product of his ministry.

This had indeed been his plain objective from the beginning. Whatever be the source and history of the Gospel material common to St Matthew and St Luke and known to scholars as Q, there can be little doubt that it shares with St Mark (by whom indeed some of it may have been used) the status of the most surely authentic records that we possess. And in it nothing is more revealing than the story of the Temptation. It is easy to regard the three tests as primarily affecting himself. Shall he use his vocation to attain comfort and security, power and control, or wonder and worship? Is his work primarily in the economic, the political or the religious field? But for One facing the call and mission of his baptism, and committed to work not for himself but for God and his neighbours, there is surely a larger and more obvious issue. There were three main methods by which a community could be built up, three types of institution appropriate to human advancement. Panem et circenses, bread and the games. security and the welfare state -- for one brought up in a village under alien rule surely the first task was to raise the

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standard of life. All over the Empire friendly societies, insurance guilds, burial clubs were familiar: indeed a century later friendly magistrates seem to have been ready to license the Church under this category. But 'man does not live by bread alone': an economic ideal is never fully satisfying.

Tu regere imperio populos,1 the way of the marching legion and the establishment of an empire which should dominate and unify the peoples. The method was utterly familiar: it had been used oppressively but for the Roman peace. Might not a Son of David fulfil popular expectations, expel the pagan overlords, and establish it by a right use of force and under his own supremacy? 'Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God: him only shalt thou serve' -- no political revolution would fulfil God's will and way.

'The Messiah shall descend from heaven in the Courts of the Temple', so they had predicted, and so it had been promised. 'He shall give his angels charge over thee, and in their hands they shall bear thee up.' Surely it was blameless so to trust in God, so to fulfil his word, so to vindicate his mission. 'Give us a sign' was the constant petition of his hearers. To call out the awe and adoration of his people, to display to them the resources of the supernatural -- Israel would respond to such a summons and God would fulfil his word and their hope. 'Thou shalt not exploit the Lord thy God.'

So the three types of institution were rejected and the three concepts of God as Universal Provider, as King of kings, and Worker of miracles were all rejected as inadequate and false. What remained? The way of parenthood and the family, the concept of creative and all-embracing love, the prayer 'Our Father' and the blessed community of his chil. dren. So the course was set for Calvary and Pentecost.

1 'It is for you to bear dominion over the peoples' (Virgil).

IV - The Development of Ethics in St Paul

THE FIRST IMPACT OF JESUS

FOR the subject of Christian ethics, especially in its modern form and in Protestant circles, it is to the teaching of St Paul that appeal is particularly addressed. Luther, Calvin, and to a less degree the Reformers generally, found in the Apostle to the Gentiles not only the protagonist in the struggle against legalism and traditionalism but the founder of an elaborate and systematized theology which could be readily applied to the conditions of their conflict with mediaeval Catholicism. He gave them both examples of destructive criticism and new positions by which what they rejected could be replaced. Their attitude was basically valid. Jesus had proclaimed and

initiated what was plainly a new Way, rooted indeed in the Old Testament but emerging out of it and inevitably by the action of its representatives breaking away from it. St Paul, once he was convinced of the truth and power of the good news, spent his life in expressing its significance in terms providing abundance of doctrinal exposition appropriate both to theology and ethics. The trouble was, and is still, that though dealing with letters written at different times and in concrete situations and by a man of singularly alert and rapidly developing mind, the Pauline interpreters took all his work as similar, consistent and systematic and strove to force

every element from any part of it into a single and rigid framework. In doing so they too often fastened upon phrases to which they' imputed a wholly exaggerated and often

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demonstrably Mistaken significance; they made no allowance for his changes of opinion even where they are precisely stated and easily traced; and they hardly recognized the distinction which he himself repeatedly stressed between casual and ad hoc ideas, speculative interpretations, particular injunctions and essential principles, or were ready to admit that even in these last there was, as we shall see, a marked development involving both a readiness to discard earlier statements and an increasing depth and novelty of exposition. He learnt by experience, and his experience was large and vivid.

It is not necessary here to examine in detail the character of this so-called Taulinism or the extent to which it offers a parody of the Apostle's fully developed faith. Our concern is to continue the examination of the impact of Jesus upon his contemporaries and of their understanding of his significance and of the 'good news'. And plainly none of the records that they have left is more important or has been more influential than the Epistles which St Paul wrote in the course of his long and strenuous journeyings. They are the more valuable for our purpose because, unlike much of the epistolary literature of the period, they are genuine letters written, even in the case of that to the Romans, with a definite situation in view and in relation to the writer's immediate concern and interests. He is dealing with specific reports and requests and plans, not producing essays for publication. As such they reflect his own moods and thoughts at the moment, and are largely independent of one another. So he does not aim at a studied consistency either of contents or style; and only in one instance sets out the record of his message with any fulness. To a careful reader it is inevitable to discover a clear development both in the method and in the meaning of his message: as soon as we arrange the letters in their approximate sequence we discover how plain-

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ly they represent successive and often important changes not only of emphasis but of interpretation. He is the last writer present us with a single and static system: we can see not only varying points of view but almost revolutionary developments as we follow his course.

For me at least it is much easier to do so, and the result is both more intelligible and more satisfactory, if we accept in broad outline the historicity of the sections about St Paul in Acts. Granted that a companion who only met him at Samotace and was not with him for any long period until his imprisonment at Caesarea would not have known of his letters or of the problems he was facing in them; granted, too, that this companion, St Luke, was a Greek whose language and mentality did not make it easy for him to understand the depth and intensity of his friend's temperament or his eminently rabbinical arguments; granted that St Luke's story of St Paul's dealings with the Church at Jerusalem is not easy to reconcile with that in Galatians, and that his account of the speaking with tongues at Pentecost is very different from the estimate of it given to the Corinthians; yet the scepticism which questions the reliability of the whole record in Acts not only demolishes for us the only contemporary evidence but does so on very inadequate grounds. It is a mistake to infer that, because the author is in error about Theudas or Lysanias of Abilene, or has written a phrase or two which suggests acquaintance with Josephus (in an age when reference libraries were not available and oral evidence was not necessarily more exact than it is today), he cannot be relied upon when he states that Saul was of Tarsus or had sat at the feet of Gamaliel.

That Saul. was a Jew of the Dispersion, speaking the common Greek of the time and acquainted with its social life and to some extent its literature and ideas; that Tarsus, a centre of Hellenistic and Jewish contacts and a principal

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source of Stoic philosophy, is exactly the sort of place where such a man would be at home; and that his parents were of good standing sufficient to send their son to be trained as a rabbi at Jerusalem and to possess Roman citizenship; these are all matters which Acts and Epistles alike corroborate. Saul's own claims -- 'of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrew stock, a blameless observer of the Law, and a youth of outstanding ability' -- speak not only to his pride of lineage but to a sound estimate of his gifts. He obviously had a good memory, an alert and vivid mind, and a skill and speed in translating ideas into action. He was also sensitive both to impressions and to criticism though stopping short of unhealthy introspection or jealousy, a visualizer and something of a mystic with a trained knowledge of Jewish faith and practice, and at the same time a man capable of rapid and decisive judgment, of appropriate planning, and of energetic efforts to make his dreams come true. The facts that he is at once Paul the visionary and Paul the valiant, and that he has been freely credited not only with effective propagation of Christianity as it has become, but even with its origination, testify at least to the singular power of his genius, if not always to, the discrimination of his interpreters. On his own showing he was the slave and apostle of Christ dependent wholly upon his Master and striving that his own thought and life should be 'hid with Christ in God'. To this end he dedicates all his versatility, using every sort of material from the circus or the army, from the schools, the 'mystery religions' or the scriptures, if it can illuminate or emphasize his Master's way. When the Athenians called him a 'seed-picker' (Acts 17.18) they had some ground for their mockery; and the efforts that he lays upon us if we are to find full meaning in his wealth of imagery can be studied in any of his commentators.

That Saul was living in Jerusalem during the ministry of

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Jesus and had then actually seen him seems clear from the explicit statement 'although we have known Christ in his bodily life' (2 Cor. 5.16),1 It is borne out not only by his whole attitude at and after the Crucifixion, but by his clear appreciation of his Master's quality and message. Like many of the Pharisees among whom he was evidently already prominent he was obviously attracted by the reports of Jesus and, as one who looked for the coming of the Messiah, ready to examine those reports with sympathy. But he shared their dilemma. In many respects they were ready to acknowledge Jesus and even to follow him. But he was so outspoken in his criticism not only of particular ordinances, like the rules of the Sabbath and of fasting, of the law itself and of the tradition, but also of themselves, the rabbis and members of the sect, that no clear decision could be speedily taken. They had sent a deputation to watch him in Galilee; they lost no opportunity to question him, sometimes with subtlety, some times with sympathy and admiration. When the Sadducees planned to arrest and accuse him, they may well have felt a certain relief that the matter would now be decided. For the test was obvious: charged with treason he would, if condemned, be crucified, 'hanged upon a tree', and this was the death specially cursed by the Law (Dent. 21.23). If Jesus were of God, he would surely be rescued: God would not leave him to suffer damnation: he would be saved and come down from his cross. Many of his disciples, perhaps as has often been suggested Judas Iscariot himself, may have shared this belief. It underlay the taunts of his accusers at Calvary and the challenge of the rabbis 'let the Christ, the King of Israel, come down now from the Cross that we may see and

This is the plain meaning of the Greek, and agrees both with the words that precede it and the passage that follows. The efforts of Molfatt and others to give a different meaning to 'we have known' are unnecessarily and inconsistent with St Paul's regular usage.

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believe' (Mark 15.32), and persisted until the end in the suggestion that Elijah would appear and rescue him. And for Saul the issue in all its magnitude was plain, and the verdict was immediately decisive. God had not intervened: Jesus was accursed. his claim was false: his followers must be destroyed. The vigour of his persecution bespeaks the bitterness of his disappointment.

He must have been badly shaken by the martyrdom of Stephen, though the immediate effect was to intensify the violence of his assault: an error which could produce such heroism must be stamped out at all costs. So, to Damascus and the sudden and overwhelming experience of the presence and the appeal of Jesus. (For his own account, see 1 Cor. 15.8.) Conversion was immediate; and we can now more fully understand its psychology and its permanence. Jesus was not defeated but vindicated, not the Galilean imposter but the anointed of God: the verdict against him was false, the curse was defied, the law which decreed the curse was broken and disowned. His recovery from the blinding shock, his acceptance by Ananias, his preaching of Jesus as Messiah, his escape from Aretas and the city (2 Cor. 11.32-33; cf. Acts 9.25), and his retirement into Arabia confirmed his conviction of the scale of the change that must be made, and of his own special vocation to proclaim the good news to the Gentile world, and gave him opportunity to work out his first interpretation of the significance of the Way. After three years he visited Jerusalem and met St Peter and James the Lord's brother, apparently through the good offices of Barnabas (cf. Gal. 1.18-20; Acts 9.26-30). After a fortnight's stay he sailed from Caesarea to Tarsus and was joined there by Barnabas who took him to Antioch, where they spent a whole year.

Fourteen years later he went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas and Titus a Greek and uncircumcised, and set out

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the record of their mission to the Gentiles (Gal.. 2.1-3). This aroused 'controversy and much discussion but led to their official authorization by James, Peter and John to go as missionaries to the non-Jews on the sole condition that they remembered the poor, presumably those of the mother church. which they were very ready to do. Whether this visit is the one mentioned in Acts 11.30 and 12.25 (when the two apostoles took a collection specially raised in Antioch for the famine-stricken people of Jerusalem), or represents the meeting and Council held there, attended by Paul and Barnabas and others after their return from their journey to Cyprus and South Galatia and described at length in Acts 15.1-35, is much disputed. It is highly important for the dating of the letter to the Galatians and for the historical accuracy of the documents. For myself I see no reason why the visit described in Galatians should not be the second, that with Titus. If so, Galatians will have been written soon after the journey's end and before the Council of Acts 15. It seems also possible that the Epistle of James if, as I think, it clearly refers to Galatians, may also be earlier than the Council. But the question is difficult and controversial, and for our present purpose not very relevant.

For, on either dating, the Epistle to the Galatians, that is of course to the people of lconium, Lystra and Derbe, is the earliest, considerably the earliest, of his surviving letters as, indeed, its presentation of the faith, its style and contents, and its reflection of his temper and outlook sufficiently indicate. That there are some striking verbal resemblances between it and Romans is sufficiently explained by the fact that in these cases he is covering similar ground and repeating a familiar and for him fundamental argument, the whole problem of the relation between law and grace, the old ethic and the new. Anyone who is constantly challenged to speak on a single theme will know how inevitably certain sequen-

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ces, phrases and key-words become stereotyped. An interval of ten years does not mean that in such cases the old vocabulary has been outgrown.

The character of the Epistle is to be seen even in its opening paragraphs. There is a brusque and almost violent plunge after the formal opening into the controversy aroused by those who had visited his new converts, questioned his authority and urged on them the need to accept the Jewish tradition so far as it involved circumcision and the Law. It is surely the writing of a young man badly hurt by the personal imputations against him, upset by the seeming fickleness of his followers, and unrestrained in the bitterness of his complaints or the violence of his denunciations. This is the natural reaction of an able but comparatively recent convert who is still thrilled by the novelty of his cause and conscious of his power to present it. He can recount his record and his adventures with a legitimate satisfaction, can denounce with irritation and scorn the malignity of his detractors and has obviously still to learn to 'slake his fires' or to deal gently with his readers. He was a 'brash' young man when he answered his opponents in Galatia.

The crude style and language of his censure is in keeping with the involved logic and rabbinical analogies of his argumentation. Like a clever young advocate's they are too subtle to be convincing and too artificial to seem quite genuine. Verbal niceties like the distinction between seeds and seed, or the bewildering saying about a mediator, detract from the power of his case; and analogies like that between Hagar and Mount Sinai hardly carry conviction. Comparison with any other of his letters shows how far he outgrew this method of presenting his case -- though in fact he never shows much sign of creative imagination in the choice of his illustrative examples.

The same conclusion is established by his exposition of

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what is always his main theme, the significance of the Cross. At this stage of his thought it is quite simple and is obviously coloured by his own problem. Christ by accepting the accursed death and so coming under the sentence 'Cursed is everyone that is hanged upon wood' has broken the curse, shown it to be impotent, and so set us free from our enslavement to the Law. We can no longer look to the Law to save us and bring us to God. For us now another way is open, our faith in Christ, by which we can be made righteous as we could never have been by Law. He has thus found the clue to the new ethic in our response to Christ's gift of himself. But he has not yet explored it: justification is still a word ilustrated by Abraharn's belief in God (Gen. 15.6), and by the contrast between this faith and 'works' of the Law. He has realized the difference, so manifest in Jesus, between personal and legal ethics, the life of constant relationship to God and the life regulated and defined by precise duties of obedience. But the profound changes which underlie the contrast and after our concept of the nature of God and of the quality of our own development have not yet become evident to him. The great discovery that he made at Corinth, and the psychology and cosmology expounded in Romans, are still in the future. He is on the track: he has hardly begun to press on.

Yet though the letter is open to criticism when compared with the work of his fully matured experience, how remarkable it is for a first essay in Christian apologetic! It has passion, that essential quality of all vital, creative and enduring work. Its author cares intensely, is wholly involved in the themes of which he writes, and is not afraid or ashamed to disclose the strength of his feelings. If there are traces of pride and of self-pity they are always corrected by and subordinate to his sense of dedication; and it is his vocation rather than himself that supplies the incentive to his efforts

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and pleadings. He bears, and can claim to bear, the stigmata of Jesus.

For among the controversies and debates of this first letter, the essential genius of the Apostle reveals itself in three sayings of startling insight and splendour -- three of the most remarkable utterances of his liffe -- three revelations which do in fact summarize the three essential elements in Christian ethics: the God-centredness, the universality and the moral perfection of the faith. These sayings are the more remarkable because each one of them stands out in sharp contrast with the tense emotion and laboured thought of the rest of the letter. These are sudden flashes of immediate and brilliant inspiration, the sort of direct awareness that is more characteristic of art than of science, but yet is probably the medium of all great discoveries. It is not an achievement of the logical intellect but rather the source of its richest material. It represents the moment of revelation in which periods of previous tension and anxiety, speculation and experiment are resolved. It is the point at which revelation and discovery achieve their union, and become vital and creative. In it the whole self of the initiate is involved and the mystery, the open secret, is disclosed. Here in these utterances are the essentials of the Christian way of life.

The first of these follows on the long record of his dealings with the church leaders at Jerusalem and afterwards with Peter because of his equivocal behaviour at Antioch and on the argument upon works of law or faith in Christ as means of justification. At the conclusion of this he sums up his own position. 'In my own case it was by means of law that I died to law that I may live to God' (Gal. 2.19). He then bursts into the tremendous declaration: 'I have been crucified along with Christ: I live, yet no longer I; it is Christ that lives in me; the life that I am new living in flesh I am living in faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.'

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Here he has fastened upon the central and unique fact of the Christian experience that our response to Christ is not that of a pupil for his teacher or a servant for his master, or even of friend for friend. Faith is not intellectual assent or practical obedience or affectionate response: it is total comitment, and so involves a real and integrative union at the level of personal fulfilment. Love thus reaches its consummation; and the oneness to which our human loves at their zenith aspire, but which on that plane they cannot permanently and perfectly attain, is realized. Christ lives in us; we are transformed by his indwelling: we are in him. This is, of course, St Paul's master-conviction, the en Christo which Deissmann taught us to see as the mainspring of his fully matured achievement. Life 'in Christ' is the fulfilment of the impact of the ministry of Jesus: it is the goal of the creative process, the secret of our human endeavour. Paul's subsequent development is the growth of this experience in him: those who have seen and known individuals who manifest a similar Christ-centred way of life, will recognize its unique worth.

Out of this utterance develops also the whole conception of the body of Christ into which this faith admits us and by which it is made effective. This is the fellowship of the Spirit, the blessed community, the organic society brought to birth at Pentecost, but of which Paul was the first to give full interpretation. His subsequent letters enable us to trace the steps by which this concept not only replaced for him the old categories of individual salvation as it had already replaced those of legal righteousness, but led him to see that beyond the human integration here on earth there was a cosmic and universal relationship whereby in Christ God is all in all.

The second utterance is equally sudden and revolutionary. It arises out of the argument concerning the Law and faith based upon the promise to Abraham, who 'believed God and

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it was reckoned to him as righteousness', that in him 'all nations should be blessed' (Gen. 12.3; 18.18). After arguing that the promise points forward to Christ and that the Law was an episode established to safeguard men against evil and to conduct them to Christ, an episode in some sense fostering sin and now finished, he breaks out: You are all children of God through faith in Christ Jesus; you, baptized into Christ, have been clothed with Christ. 'There is among you neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, you are all one person in Christ Jesus' (Gal. 3.28).

The words are familiar: their relevance to our present world situation brings them into prominence: but even so their scope is still hardly realized. Conscious as we are of the dangerous effects both of our largely artificial, national and occupational differences and of the new barriers created by specialized education and sectarian interests ' we are apt to ignore the fact that behind the multiform influences which conflict with our need for a new era of world-brotherhood there are the three 'natural' divisions which the apostle here

,presents. Race and colour, class and the social order, sex and the status of womanhood constitute age-old, and as some would urge divinely ordained and therefore permanent, categories which it is impossible, if not actually wrong, to challenge. We still see Christians, and not only in South Africa or Little Rock, quoting the curse of Ham as sanction for negro-inferiority and the sinfulness of racial intermarriage; and tainted by the Malthusian doctrine that population will always outstrip means of subsistence and quoting 'the poor we have always with you' (Mark 14.7) as a pretext for laissez faire; and arguing in spite of all evidence to the contrary that sex-differentiation is an ultimate and not merely biological distinction, which therefore makes it unthinkable for women to be ordained to the Church's ministry.

Yet St Paul, who was himself brought up in an exclusive

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sect of a singularly race-conscious people, and was evidently proud of his freeborn citizenship, and was seldom wholly free from an inbred thankfulness that he had not been born a woman, could in his earliest surviving letter rise to the level which we have hardly yet reached, and declare that unity through Christ in God transcends and nullifies all such divisions. He had seen and fastened upon the universality of Jesus and though he himself had, and never apologized for having, a strong sense of the differentiation of function and a thankful readiness to accept his own assets and limitations, yet in the unity of the fellowship he has already realized and was afterwards prepared to insist that all the members, whatever their function or comeliness, have an equal honour as contributing to the life and needs of the body and are necessary to its growth and welfare. Only when all are drawn into it will 'the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ' (Eph. 4.13) be attained.

The third utterance similarly arises unexpectedly and after a long argument on the practical problem which the situation in Galatia has raised. He has claimed that Christ came to deliver men from the bondage of law and that this was in accordance with God's promise to the seed of Abraham in Christ. They are the free-born family of the Jerusalem which is above, of Isaac not of Ishmael; and the Law has no power over them. Why then is it that these Galatians who at first received Paul with such enthusiasm that in his illness they would have plucked out their eyes and given them to him, now have fallen away and accepted the obligation to circumcision and the Law? Paul repudiates strongly and violently the suggestion that he ought to agree to this: but finds himself bound to face the issue which haunted him repeatedly. If Christ meant freedom, does this involve ethical laxity? Does rejection of the Law encourage antinomianism? How are moral standards to be maintained if the rules

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defining them are abrogated?

So he was constrained to recognize that responsibility remains and must be accepted, and with it the choice between what he calls flesh and spirit. 'Walk in spirit and do not gratify the lust of flesh ... these are in rivalry: so you cannot do whatever you like. You are not under law, but the works of the flesh are obvious' (Gal. 5.16-19). Tlen after a long and rather random list of the vices and faults of the worldling which disqualify him from God's Kingdom, he breaks into his wonderful summary of the fruit of the spirit: 'Love, joy, peace, courage, mercy, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance' (Gal. 5.22-23). We accept it as familiar; and by doing so perhaps fail to realize how astonishingly complete it is as a description of the character of those whose life is centred upon Christ. If we examine it as involving three pairs of linked but seemingly contradictory qualities, we shall see how profound is the insight that has so described it.

For the first thing to notice is that thus arranged it combines the two types of moral worth which are commonly contrasted. We may call them respectively the beatitudes and the virtues, the qualities radiating from fife in God and consequent upon our experience of him, and those representing man's response to the moral and legal requirements of his personal and social life. The contrast between so-called 'Christian' and 'pagan' ethics is a commonplace. Here in this utterance, St Paul takes three that are characteristic of the chief types of Graeco-Roman merit: the joy of Epicurus,1 the fortitude of the Stoics, and the traditional virtue of Rome, and three from Christ: love, peace and mercy. The two are set side by side, blended and transcended; and the last three words in the list show how this integration is fulfilled.

1 This is not a fanciful exaggeration. Epicurus was much more than an

epicurean; cf. C. Bailey, The Greek Atomists and Epicurus, pp. 498-507.

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Love, the Christian agape which Paul was to proclaim in perfect hymn, love which is adoration quickened by percommunion and freed from the possessiveness and the emotionalism which so easily distort it, love which gives to the uttermost, is linked with joy which represents our welcome to the love that we receive, and the abundant life which love evokes. It is the virtue which Paul so freely affirmed

the letter in which he drew nearest to Jesus in the days of ministry, where he exhorted us to dwell upon 'all that is . and reverend, and righteous, and holy, and lovable honorable' (cf. Phil. 4.8-10, 2. 1-11).

Peace which so often seems to mean quietude, pacifism, ,a cloistered and static blessedness, but which Paul defines as 'the peace of God which is deeper than all intellect but nevertheless protects both emotion and intelligence' (Phil. 4.7) and is in fact the confidence and calm which underlies for the Christian all the changes and chances of our mortality, is coupled with long-suffering, the courage which is normally reckoned the most virile and excellent of human merits but which rightly understood is more fully displayed by Jesus than by any other, the fortitude which can carry on through all difficulties and all dangers.

Mercy, the attribute of God himself, the special word in Greek attached to the goodness of God and used in one famous Latin reference (by Suetonius) as the title of Christ himself, which signifies the warmth of God's righteous dealings with mankind, his benevolence and generosity, is set beside goodness, the virtue which characterizes human morality, the uprightness and just dealing, the integrity which is too near to puritanism to be wholly lovable but nevertheless bespeaks respect and even admiration, the quality by which the author of the Acts describes Barnabas (Acts 11.24).

Each of the three pairs thus combined represents an ex-

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panding phase of ethical life: love and joy the inward fruit of the relationship to God; peace and courage the effect of this relationship upon the personal attitude of the individual towards life; mercy and goodness his relationship in behaviour towards others.

The three remaining qualities describe the means by which these fruits are enabled to grow. They represent in their character and sequence the

three stages by which Jesus led his followers to their full discipleship. For faith, the first of them, describes the response in total commitment of the hearer to the good news, or rather to Jesus its herald and embodiment. Meekness is the process and end of that castingout of self which he proved to be essential for all who would lose their lives for his sake and so gain life eternal: it involves both the humiliation of failure and the humility which inherits the earth and is able both to enjoy and to enrich it. Temperance is the complete control by God in Christ which is the fulfilment of faith, the blessed freedom from the desire and the power of evil, and the continual guidance of the self-emptied and dedicated life. It is our fulfilment when in the fellowship of the blessed community we are freed and sustained and inspired for the doing of God's will. The passage appropriately ends with the famous paradox (Gal. 6.1-5) thus

disclosed between corporate and individual responsibility which St Paul set himself to resolve. As united in the spirit we must each share the burdens laid upon our fellows; for the weight of life's adventure is felt by us all, and only by us all can it be sustained; self-sufficiency is a betrayal of community. Yet each one of us must examine his own work; for each has his own load to carry.

The way of life thus expressed in its threefold aspect, the union with Christ which resolves the solitariness, breaks down the barriers and transforms the characters of mankind, is summarized as what the Apostle regularly calls charis, the

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gracious gift of God. The term, with its original meaning of 'joyful grace' and 'free favour', ascribes both the initiation ad the maintenance of the new relationship to the divine ad redemptive act manifested in Jesus and operative in St Paul at and since his conversion. Grace is already in Galatians the first of those words to which the new experience gave new meaning; and perhaps more than any other it describes he whole field of the Pauline gospel.

To Saul of Tarsus as to, the world, Jesus although long foretold had come in a form wholly unexpected and with an efect manifestly undeserved. Though his impact fulfilled the heart's desire it challenged the thought and revolutionized the ethics of his disciple. It was in all respects an act of God, a gift from heaven. Charis denoted precisely this sense of givenness.

But its quality did not end there. Indeed the isolation and exageration of its strangeness have been a chief source of the errors of exclusiveness and determinism. The gift however unmerited proved to be not only supernatural but, as Whichcote insisted, 'most natural'. The strange world to which Christ admitted him proved itself to be indeed his native land. What had seemed a summons to the wilderness became first a pilgrimage and then a home-coming. The pattern of the incarnate life, the drama of Cross and Resurrection, repeated itself: life instead of being at an end became full and free, adventurous and rewarding.

In the Galatians this wider prospect is hardly visible. Charis is associated with God's call to the Apostle (1. 15) and to his followers (1.6) and its effect upon him (2.9 and 21); and even in the saying 'you have fallen away from grace' 5.4) it need imply no more than 'rejected God's gift'. But in the Corinthian letters where the word is very freely used, though it still refers on occasion to the idea of call and gift 1 Cor. 1.4; 3.10) it is also used to denote its effects 'not

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bestowed in vain' (15.10) and their permanence (16.23), and so is applied to the state of life 'not in fleshly wisdom but in God's grace' (2 Cor. 1.12): it is 'grace abounding' (4.15) and 'not in vain' (6. 1). So in his concluding words the grace, or 'gracious gift', of our Lord Jesus Christ is identified with the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit (13.13). Finally in Romans it is freely used to describe the whole new relationship of the believer with God and indeed the whole scope of the divine activity. Very characteristic of this new sense of grace as constituting a mutual contact between God in Christ and his people is the treatment in Romans 5. It is from Christ that 'we have received our access by faith into this grace in which we have taken our stand' (2). This grace bestowed by the one Christ overflows upon us all so that we 'live as kings through him' (15, 17) and the reign of sin is replaced by the reign of grace (21). So in the next chapter law and its way is set in contrast to grace as the whole state into which the redeemed have now entered. St Paul has grown away from the idea of a divine intrusion special to himself into a recognition of the universality of God's gracious presence. So in the word which many of his interpreters regard as basic to his thought we can see how that thought develops; grace in the later epistles is itself almost replaced by the concepts of wholeness, full knowledge and community. Indeed the word scarcely occurs outside the salutations and farewells except in one striking phrase, 'the economy of grace' (Eph. 3.2), where he uses 'economy' to describe the whole dispensation and ordering of God's household.

The word 'economy' is used in connection with another word, 'mystery', evidently closely connected with 'grace' and to some extent replacing it in the later phases of St Paul's thought. 'Mystery', with its association with Eleusis and the Greek world in general, is first employed by the Apostle in

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1 Corinthians and we can trace how he uses it of a particular revelation or secret and often in the plural (4.1, 13.2, 14.2). In Romans the sense is still of a special event which discloses hidden meaning (11.25 and 16.25). In Colossians and Ephesians, where it occurs ten times, it is freely used to describe God's plan and will, and Christ's full and universal significance. As with 'grace', the primary meaning of 'mystery' is of a divine self-manifestation expressed in a symbolic and revealing event. But, because it links up rather with the effect upon the recipient than the initiative of the revealer, it emphasizes the process of expansion and universalizing of the good news and its power to illuminate, explain and inspire the whole field of human life and thought.

And with this extension of the divine grace comes a new interpretation of man's response to it. For us obedience to law has been found insufficient. To replace it was a primary necessity if the Apostle were not to lead his followers into anarchy and leave them unguided. His experience of dealing with them convinced him that love, if freed from self-reliance and expanded from love of Jesus into love for the blessed community, would supply a sensitive insight and so a constraining guidance which would be more intimate and more immediately adjustable than law. For this he discovered the word usually translated as 'full knowledge', epignosis, which represents for him our fulfilment when we have been lifted into a true rapport with Christ and the fellowship.

Three times in Romans this word epignosis, a word rare and late in classical Greek, makes its appearance, and thereafter in Philippians, Colossians and Ephesians it plays a distinctive part in St Paul's vocabulary.1 What is its meaning?

Gnosis is of course freely used in the specialized sense of

1 Elsewhere in the New Testament it occurs in 11 Peter, and Hebrews, and in the phrase 'full knowledge of truth' in the Pastorals. Cf. M. Dibelius, G. Heinrici Festschr. 18 (Leipzig 1914).

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'esoteric knowledge' as a word of religion, though in the New Testament it is well described by W. L. Knox as 'the Christian blend of faith and love'.1 Epignosis seems to have the sense of knowledge as 'intuitional awareness' rather than as 'physical contact' or 'intellectual perception'. It is applied to God,2 and to almost nothing else.3 Its verb, though keeping this meaning of 'awareness', has also a more general meaning. It is especially frequent in St Luke and Acts where it usuaIly bears the sense of recognition. Epignosis would seem to be a word singularly appropriate to describe the inward and compelling consciousness of the real truth of an object or situation, a deeper and fuller realization of what de Chardin calls the 'within' of things. It thus admirably describes the insight which the experience of love and of membership in the community and the consequent release from self-esteem and hypocrisy can enable and quicken.' As Lightfoot remarks on Phil. 1.9, 'love imparts a sensitiveness of touch'. Such sensitiveness makes possible a conviction deeper than intellectual or logically formulated knowledge. It is most easily appreciated by those who have had experience of facing the conflicts of loyalty that we associate with problems like that of war. Facing them and seeking God's guidance we have two preliminary tasks to fulfil, first to study the issue in the light of our knowledge of God and of Christian values, and then to examine our own nature and motives, stripping ourselves of our egoisms and scrutinizing as best we may our

1 Some Hellenistic Elements in Primitive Christianity, p. 86.
2 Rom. 1.28, 10.2; Col. 1.9, 1.10, 2.2 ('of the mystery of God');Eph. 1.17, 4.13 ('of the Son of God').
3 To 'sin' (Rom. 3.20) and to 'all good' (Philemon 6).
4 This meaning is supported by Dorn H. Dupont, Gnosis: la connaissance religieuse dans les Epitres de St Paul, to which my friend Prof. C. F. Moule has referred me, though Dupont associates it more strongly than seems warranted with the sacramental system.

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conscious and unconscious prejudices and desires. Then and then we can lay ourselves and our need for guidance God and the Christian fellowship, and await the This comes, I think, not in the form of an instruction or a formula: what happens is that we realize that certain courses of action are no longer possible for us; those roads am barred; the way, the only way, becomes clear to us; and we must take it. This is surely what Saint Paul meant by full knowledge and saw as the state of awareness by which the Christian must live an awareness of the whole self rather than the mind. For it is noticeable that the word syneidesis or conscience which only occurs in the Corinthian letters and three times in Romans is always used for self-knowledge or intellectual assent to obligation in regard to problems like that of meat offered to idols which are matter of argument, and that in the later letters it is replaced by the wider and more intuitive epignosis.

So the message of Galatians grows in the subsequent epistles. 'The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ' (Gal. 6.18) had developed into 'God's open secret, even Christ, in whom all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are stored away' (Col. 2.2,3), and in whom all men, Jews and Gentiles alike, are made one (Eph. 3.6-12).

V - THE DISCOVERY AT CORINTH

WHATEVER be the exact time and importance of the Council at Jerusalem as described in Acts 15, it seems clear that the acute controversy with which the Epistle to the Galatians was concerned was in fact definitely settled before the second missionary journey. The Jews still raised opposition: everywhere it became clearer that the new Way could not be accepted by them, and that the parable of the patched cloak was being fulfilled.1 But for Christians the issue was no longer open. Gentiles had been admitted into the church without conforming to the laws and rites of Judaism, and St Paul's authority as an apostle to them was not again seriously challenged. But the working out not only of the specific problem of law and grace but of the basic formulation of the Church's concept of God, of Christ, and of its own faith and conduct remained to be undertaken. If the impact of Jesus was clear and had vindicated itself, the significance of it, which the three utterances that we have been considering had illuminated, had still to be tested, defined and explained. If Jesus was like God -- and this was the basis of his authority -- then God must be like Jesus. Yet this seemed to involve changes in the traditional concepts of t`he divine. Until this question was settled, matters of conduct, the nature of righteousness and justification, of judgment and human destiny, of human relationships to God and the community must remain obscure. It is with this that St Paul's next great step in the interpretation of the faith was taken.

1 In its Lucan form (Luke 5.36; cf. Mark 2.21).

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Of the development of his thought during the second missionary journey until he got into Europe we know very little. Apart from the choice and circumcision of Timothy at Lystra, which may well have been an act of reconciliation to end the controversy in Galatians, there is no event of special importance until the decision to cross into Macedonia and the significant partnership of the Greek doctor with the Jewish evangelists. But momentous as its consequences have proved the invasion did not start too well. The brutality of the Strategi at Philippi and St Paul's very natural irritation (,they have flogged us publicly, uncondemned, though we were Roman citizens, and have thrown us into prison: and now are they throwing us out secretly? No, let them come themselves and escort us out!' Acts 16.3 7) puts him in a bad position. It is not easy to see God when one is standing on one's dignity. And even when he got to Thessalonica and preached Christ for three sabbaths his own letters show that it was not a great success.

It seems clear that he had misjudged his audience and the occasion. The place, then as now, was a port of call for shipping, with a mixed population, and at this time avid for gossip and agog for rumours. Claudins was near his end: was his successor to be Nero? and if so, what then? Claudius himself had just expelled the soothsayers and oracle-mongers, and the Jews among them, from Rome; and even the sober sceptic Tacitus devotes himself to a record of the portents and prodigies that were rife. Paul had preached Christ, but plainly in the cataclysmic language of Jewish apocalyptic. His audience had fastened upon his proclamation of 'another king, one Jesus' (Acts 17.7). They had taken his message of the sudden descent from heaven, the raising of the dead, and the ascent of the living into the air, and had interpreted it so literally as to give up their work in a frenzy of excitement and set the place in an uproar. We know from the letters to

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the Thessalonians how difficult he found it to allay the upheaval and explain his words. He had preached a God of power and had failed.

The two letters that he wrote after Silas and Timothy had joined him in Corinth show his perplexity and dissatisfaction. He still affirms his message of the speedy and literal second coming, though his second letter introduces a restraining factor and the ingenuity of centuries of comment has not succeeded in expounding his precise expectation. But the effect of his work in Thessalonica obviously preyed upon his mind, and caused him to modify and speedily abandon this crude apocalyptic presentation of the good news.

The first letter to the Thessalonians contains one phrase which not only became important for patristic theology but gives us an interesting insight into the Apostle's concept of the constitution ' of our human nature. He prays that God will sanctify his people in their wholeness and 'preserve them spirit, soul and body entire' (1 Thess. 5.23) in the coming of the Lord.1

The actual meaning of all the terms used to describe the several elements of our nature by St Paul is neither precisely defined nor always consistently used. An examination of 'spirit' for example sometimes leaves us doubtful whether he regards spirit (pneunw) as divine, the Holy Spirit indwelling in the saints, or as a normal constituent of *some or of all human beings, and if so what is its relation to 'mind'. So, too, though 'soul' (psyché) is usually identified with the animating principle and centre of the lower impulses, its pejorative use is not very consistent. Even 'body' (soma) is sometimes applied to the whole physical nature but sometimes distinguished sharply from 'flesh' (sarx), which is the seat of animal

1 Frequently quoted during the Apollinarian controversy, when Apollinarius adopted this threefold division of human nature.

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passions. Here his vocabulary has not acquired a clear technical meaning.1

But from this passage one point is evident; and it is borne out in his later discussion of the resurrection. He has a strong sense of the wholeness of our human personality, and is not prepared to divide it sharply into the dualism of body and soul, physical and spiritual. He insists that the resurrection involves not indeed this 'flesh and blood' but a 'spiritual body' continuing and enabling the fulfilment of those functions of contact with its environment and relationship with others for which here the body is our means of attainment. If we cannot call his concept 'psycho-somatic', he would at least share Prof. Ryle's modem philosophical dislike of theories of 'the ghost in the machine'. This sense of the essential unity of personality is of high importance in enabling him to develop his doctrine of the Body of Christ, and still more his extension of it to cosmic significance.

From Beroea St Paul went on to Athens, and in that great academic centre among the schoolmen of the Areopagus delivered, according to Acts 17, his great sermon about the unknown god. With its appeal to the maker of the universe, lord of heaven and earth, to the temples and statues in his honour, to the life and breath which are his gift to all the nations who despite their differences share in the search for him and in him live and move and have their being, with its quotation from Aratus and its invitation to pay heed to the good news proclaimed by the man chosen by God and raised by him from the dead, the speech should have been wholly appropriate to his audience. It met with laughter and a polite suggestion that he should address them again. He had

1 As indeed in other cases, notably the terms descriptive of office in the church; it is a mistake to suppose that words later reserved to denote bishops or deacons had for St Paul any such restricted meaning.

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preached a God of wisdom and had done so without much success.

On his own showing he went to Corinth humbled and aware that in becoming all things to all men he had somehow missed the true significance of his message. 'I resolved not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and fear and much trembling, and my speech and message was not in plausible words of wisdom but in manifestation of spiritual power that your faith be not centred upon man's wisdom but upon God's power' (1 Cor. 2.2-5). And in that humiliation he found the true answer to his need.

He acknowledged his mistakes in presenting God as power or as wisdom by affirming that such a presentation is a parody of the good news. 'It is the Jews who demand miracles and the Greeks who seek wisdom: we preach Christ crucified; to the Jews that is a scandal; to the Gentiles it is folly; but to those who are called, Jews and Greeks alike, Christ is God's power and God's wisdom' (1 Cor. 1.22-24). If God is like Jesus, he is neither the supernatural miracleworker nor the philosopher and engineer. His picture is a man on a Cross, the symbol of the love that gives and suffers. He is 'our Father'; and love is the only true power and the only true wisdom. If we had only realized and remembered this, Christians would not have endorsed the politics of the divine right of kings or the philosophy which likened God and the world to the watchmaker and his watch; and we might have been spared centuries of conflict, with the Church usually on the wrong side. We should have seen more deeply into the nature and necessity of power and of wisdom, and got a steadier glimpse of the meaning of evil and of pain.

The effect of this basic change in St Paul's concept of the nature of God, while it is the logical outcome of his experience of the indwelling and transforming Christ, is also

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the solution of his problems in regard to law and grace. Not only does he now realize that the whole concept of God as lawgiver is defective but he begins to grasp how it can be replaced. In Galatians he had hardly got beyond the belief that, even if law was insufficient or even outmoded, there was a clear enough sense of the difference between right and wrong to save us from moral bewilderment. But in spite of his lists of vices and of the fruit of the spirit it is evident that he is very far from having reached a definite criterion by which actions can be judged. Now, with his surer grasp upon the love and fatherhood of God, he discloses in his answers to the mistakes and questionings of his followers that he has found a satisfying test appropriate to the new theology and covering the whole field of ethics. In this first letter to Corinth he is still developing it and has not fully explored its value: in his later dealings with the city he has reached a more considered and consistent standard. This standard is of course wholly personal and communal, and identifies, the goal of right behaviour with the welfare and development of the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, the universal family of God.

It is a curious miscellany, this collection of problems on which the Apostle tries to advise his flock according to the principle that the barriers of race, class and sex are transcended in Christ Jesus. They range from grave moral problems like the case of incest or the questions of marriage with unbelievers to the matter of meat from heathen sacrifices or the veiling of women when they pray; and in content there is an interesting variety. On questions affecting marriage he is much more liberal than his critics have always realized. He stands for a complete sexual equality in the marital relationship, is generous in his attitude towards mixed marriages, and though he obviously regards single life as preferable, is neither ascetic nor puritan. One section refers to contemporary customs which we hardly understand; in one or two

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he lapses into male supremacy (e.g. 1 Cor. 11.7-10), and several times he distinguishes between a commandment of the Lord and an opinion of his own. On matters of social status including the ugly but universal fact of slavery which Roman power had tended to make specially degrading, he is much less definite than we should expect; as between circumcised and uncircumcised, or between slave and free, each should keep to his own condition, though if the slave has an opportunity of freedom he should take it. We are all slaves of Christ and 'bought with a price' (1 Cor. 7.23); it is our relation to God that matters. On food-rules and customs, though these are in themselves trivial, they may cause offence to a more scrupulous brother; and his conscience must be respected. We must in the exercise of our freedom be careful to do what will commend our way of life to the widest possible circles. 'I do everything on account of the good news that I may be a good partner with it' (1 Cor. 9.23). Like the athlete or the boxer we must devote ourselves at any cost to our fitness. There is always a way to overcome the temptation that would betray our trust. You who are in communion with the blood and the body of the Christ and become one in him must abstain from idolatry: 'everything is possible; everything is not appropriate; everything is possible; everything does not edify: let no one seek his own advantage, but another's.' So he transcends the quest for individual salvation, and takes as his criterion the building up of the body of Christ. 'Do all to the glory of God' (1 Cor. 10.23-31) and according to 'The witness of conscience' (II Cor. 1.12).

He had to admit that this standard is all too frequently ignored. Even in their Church Assembly, which here at this time seems to have combined elements of the Greek eranos or contributory meal with the Jews' Paschal supper and the Christian eucharist, there are factions; each brings his own

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food and some go hungry. You do not realize the sanctity of what you are doing or recognize the nature of the Lord's body; 'instead of proclaiming the Lord's death you are ignoring it' (1 Cor. 11.26,27).' So, starting from this, he expounds his concept of the Lord's body. We constitute it. Our gifts, ministries and activities are individual and different; but our spirit is one and the same -- the Holy Spirit whereby we confess that Jesus is Lord. All our functions -- and he lists nine of them -- are distinct operations of the one same Spirit. Christ is like our own body, constituted by many membersfoot and hand, car and eye, each is necessary and there can be no rivalry between them. And among them are some that seem weak and shameful and uncomely, yet are essential to the life of the whole. 'If one is in pain, all suffer with it, if one is praised, all are glad with it: you are Christ's body, each part with its proper function' (1 Cor. 12.26,27), from apostles to interpreters of 'tongues'; and you seek for the more important gifts. So he expounds his vision of community and opens up the source of its unity.

'And yet I am showing you a more excellent way' (1 Cor. 13.1). So he breaks into his hymn to the new quality, the Christian love for which agape is the untranslatable name, the love which at once expresses, integrates and sublimates the oneness of the community, and reflects in it the very essence of God. It transcends all the so-called values, aesthetic and psychic, intellectual and intuitional, conative and moral. It is untainted by self-seeking, uncorrupted by passion. It neither exploits nor sentimentalizes. It is adequate to all occasions, unlimited in its scope, eternal in its quality. Here at our present stage we are like infants, half-developed in speech and thought and reasoning; here even our vision is

1 For the significance of the Pauline teaching on the sacrament in those passages, cf. H. A. A. Kennedy, St Paul and The Mystery Religions, pp. 263-79.

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dim and defective, and our knowledge partial; we grow up into more direct vision, into knowledge objective and full. Love is immediate and undistorted; it alone remains, the source and content of real experience.

So in the most beautiful of his utterances he sets out the imature of this new and still indescribable quality which enables what biologists call symbiosis and fulfils a new type of human relationship; the quality which he has learnt to regard as the specific attribute of God, the quality which more and more filled for him the whole worth and meaning of life. It is a rhapsody the more remarkable because addressed to the people of Corinth, the city dominated by the temple of Aphrodité Pandemos, the centre of ritual prostitution, and itself synonymous all over the Mediterranean world with sophisticated vice. That in such a place where every word associated with sex had a tainted meaning he could insist that it is not in intellect nor in ethics, neither by righteous actions nor by legal precepts, but by personal relationships dedicated to the love of God and neighbour in Christ that men attain full maturity and a saving experience, is a sufficient proof of his own growth in the understanding of the good news, and of his power to impart his new message to others. This is at once the positive side of his insistence upon life in Christ and the incentive towards its universal applicability; and also the expansion, in terms of its human efficacy, of the changed theology which centred upon God as love and Christ crucified as love's perfect symbol.

It remains to be seen how a deeper analysis of the nature and Working of Christian love, and a fuller treatment of the fellowship of the Spirit first described in chapter 13, led him on to the culmination of his interpretation of the good news. Up to new he has recognized love as the fulfilment of the Law and the primary factor in the life of God and through Christ in men. Beyond this he comes to proclaim it as the

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universal condition of real being, the integrative element in nature and history, in the cosmos as in the individual.

The rest of the Epistle contains the very interesting discussion of the speaking with tongues, the wordless utterance so often the outcome of psychic excitement, the glossolalia which was interpreted by the author of Acts as the gift of diverse languages and played a large part in the assemblies of the earliest Christians. St Paul takes a strongly critical view of it as compared with preaching, since the latter is intelligible and a direct means of explaining the good news while glossolalia is meaningless unless it is translated. To sing with the spirit is of value to the person uttering, to praise with the mind edifies all who hear. 'I would rather speak five words in the church with my mind than ten thousand words in a tongue' (1 Cor. 14.19). It is important for us to note the emphasis that he lays upon intellectual as compared with emotional influence: evangelism has too often neglected his warning.

From this he turns to matters of equal interest but of less importance from the ethical standpoint, except as showing that in spite of the great advance in his theology he has still retained something of his old stress upon individual and apocalyptic imagery. His list of the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus is important not only as demonstrating his insistence on this category of evidence for the risen life and presence of Christ, but as drawing no distinction between the appearances before the Ascension and that to him on the Damascus road. There is no warrant here for asserting that the claims of saints throughout the Christian era to have seen the Risen Lord are physically different from these put forward in the Gospels.

It is when St Paul goes on to discuss and describe our resurrection that he returns in a phrase to the language of Thessalonians. That our lives here do not end with the death

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of the body, that hereafter we shall still be 'embodied' (if by that word we mean still conscious of relationships and able to recognize and communicate with others), and that though 'flesh and blood', the purely physical and self-imprisoned life with its inherent corruption, 'cannot inherit the Kingdom of God' (1 Cor. 15.50) yet suddenly 'at the last trumpet; for the trumpet will sound' (cf. 1 Thess. 4.16), the uncorrupted dead will experience resurrection and the mortal will put on immortality. The concept and imagery of the second advent is indeed much less dramatic and violently intrusive than before, and he is no longer concerned with it as an event to take place in the near future or at a specific moment. But the account suggests that he has not reached his full grasp, of the continuity and consistency of the divine action.

It is in the second, or as some think the second and third, letters that the Apostle turns away from the temporary, local and practical problems and sets out the scope and unity of the good news and the contrast between it and the earthen vessels in which it is contained. Much of it is concerned with his own personal weaknesses, his motives and aspirations, his adventures and consolations. It is not easy for us not knowing the precise circumstances and relationships of his career to estimate or even to interpret the depths of his self-examination and his analysis: and his own changing mood does not make it easier. But if we are often amazed at the psychological insights and profundity of his Epistle to the Romans, we can realize from this correspondence how thoroughly he has scrutinized his own work and the influences which have determined it.

From the more general angle the contribution of 2 Corinthians is its increasing grasp upon the unity of the theological basis of the faith which has power to transform and integrate us into the very life of God. It is expressed in such phrases as 'the Lord is the Spirit' (2 Cor. 3.17), where the

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oneness of the revelation in Christ and of our reflection of it as in a mirror is affirmed; or as 'the Christ who is the image of God' (2 Cor. 4.4), a phrase which is basic to his Christology. It is most fully outlined in the great passage: 'If any man be in Christ, there is a new creation: the old has passed away; behold it has become the new: but all is of God who has reconciled us to himself by Christ and given us a ministry of reconciliation, namely that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not reckoning to them their faults but establishing in us the word of reconciliation' (II Cor. 5.1719). So he expounds the significance of his characteristic phrase 'in Christ' and indicates the philosophy of history which leads him to the great exposition of the frustration, travail and goal of the creation in Romans 8 and the doctrine of the cosmic and consummating Christ in Colossians and Ephesians.

The final sections of the Epistle, probably a distinct letter. reiterate a similar theme in a different key. They sum up in the last sentence, the oft repeated 'Grace', what may well be reckoned the earliest Christian creed: 'the gracious gift of the Lord Jesus Christ, which guarantees for us the love of God and enables in us the community of the Holy Spirit' (2 Cor. 13.13).

VI - THE TREATISE TO ROME

Thouch the great discovery had been made at Corinth, it was surely at Ephesus that St Paul worked out its significance and presented it as an ordered exposition of the good news in his Epistle to the Romans. Apart from the long interlude in which he pays his debt to his Jewish origin and, facing the haunting question 'Why did his own people reject Jesus when M came to them?', writes of it with his former passion, both the theological and the ethical sections of his work display the maturity of his thought in its full scope with a wisdom, a coherence and an insight which has made this letter ever since the criterion of Christian doctrine. Its many-sided thought has inevitably exposed it to a variety of renderings; as with the figure of Jesus himself, men have seen in it what they could appropriate and often fastened upon sayings which when exaggerated are strangely distorting. But behind the diversity of its elements there is a solidity and a depth which must make every student realize how much there is in it still incompletely understood. It is surely the fruit of his two years in Asia, of his lectures in the school of Tyrannus, and of his peril at the hands of Alexander.' He has had time not only to reflect upon and explore his own experience, but to discuss and expound it and enlarge the background of his thought. As a result the external supernaturalism of his earlier language has been almost completely translated into an inward and psychological explanation in terms of personal relationships and keeping close to, his understanding of the nature and purpose of God.

1 Cf. Acts 19 and 20; 2 Cor. 1.8-11; Tim. 4.14-5.

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The treatise starts with a Christology. The Apostle writes as the slave of Jesus Christ, set aside for the good news of God which he proclaimed of old by his prophets in holy scriptures about his Son 'who, was born of the seed of David according to his flesh but defined as Son of God in power according to his spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead' (Rom. 1.3,4). The two-fold sonship thus stressed stands alone in Pauline utterance and gives at once a formal theology to the work which it introduces.

He begins with expressions of thankfulness for Christ Jesus and the good news, for his own share in its proclamation and his obligation to Greeks and non-Greeks, to wise and simple, and for the faith which underlies and appropriates it. Then he develops a philosophy of history, tracing the failure of mankind in general and of the Jews among them. It is an interpretation quite new to his thought, and plain evidence of its growth. Men have failed through neglect of religion, neglect of righteousness and consequent perversion of truth. God has disclosed himself to them: 'his unseen qualities, his eternal power and divinity, intelligible ever since the creation of the world through his works, are clearly seen by them' (Rom. 1.20). So they are inexcusable. They knew God, for the witness of natural religion revealed him: they knew God, but did not glorify him as God: they were frustrated in their thought of him and their emotions were blinded. For all their boasted wisdom they fell into idolatry and, degrading God, degraded one another also, exploiting their bodies by lust and perversion. Then, as they corrupted the most intimate and sacred of human relationships and refused to 'keep God in their full knowledge',' he gave them up to every kind of vice and crime, and their whole moral standards were flouted and ignored. We may not share his point of view in detail, but at least its insistence upon the primitive and universal

1 Rom. 1.28, the first use by St Paul of epignosis.

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fact of religion, upon the primary importance of sex and personal contacts, and upon the need for decent standards, is very much more appropriate to us than most ethical theories of his time.

Then he turns to the Jew and contends that he is in no position to criticize: for in fact his own achievement is no better, and he cannot expect a privileged position. God pays no heed to appearances: he judges men by their conduct whether they be Jew or Greek. The Jew has his special revelation, not in nature but in the Law: yet the Law will not save unless men keep it; and the Scripture declares that all have sinned he Law defines sin for us; it does not deliver us from it.

Against this background he proclaims that a new revelation of God's righteousness has been given us. It has been given to already by Law and prophets, but its mode is new and universal. It is by commitment to Jesus Christ whom God has displayed to us as the occasion for our justification, a means of release from our slavery to sin, a sort of expiation and propitiation, a sacred object like the Ark of the Covenant (Rom. 3.25), a meeting-point of God with man, an example, an inspiration, an indwelling. This is God's act, God's gracious gift to us all, Gentiles and Jews alike; for all are of God.

He concludes this first section by returning to the case of Abraham which he had already stated in writing to the Galatians. Whether or no the objection to his argument in the Epistle of St James (2.20-24) was known to him, he was certainly familiar with its content, and here answers it with courtesy but decisively. The promise in Gen. 15.6 was given, not as St James represents because of his obedience in offering up Isaac (Gen. 22), but long before when Abraham was still uncircumcised and before Isaac's birth. So it was plainly as a reward of his faith and had nothing to do with the

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Law or his subsequent actions; and the blessing is fulfilled in Christ.

In the second section he turns from the wide field of history to the more restricted field of the significance of our reconciliation. It has produced for us, through Jesus Christ, the peace which arises from our access to the gracious relationship with God and the confidence whose hope is of God's glory. Moreover we can face even our afflictions with similar confidence since from them come fortitude and the tests which guarantee hope. It was in our weakness when we were sinners and enemies that Christ gave his life for us: now that his death has rescued us, his life will keep us safe and reconciled to God. As it was through one man, Adam, that sin and death came upon us all, so now and on a grander scale through one's man grace the gift of God's grace has been won for us, and death is replaced by life.

But if out of our sin God found occasion to save us, can we not find from this an argument for continuing to give him such opportunities? Why not accept sin and remain in it? For folks who resolve sin into a succession of particular acts (and certain sorts of church discipline seem to do so) this may be plausible. St Paul sweeps it away at once: sin and grace are not like the debit and credit sides of an account: they are a matter of life or death. The man reconciled to God cannot again live 'in sin'. He has died in Christ his representative: he has been raised by him to live in him. Death can no longer dominate Christ and must not through our sin be allowed to recover possession of us who are in Christ. This primary union with God in Christ is the decisive event -- the converting experience. How can we interpret it? And having done so, how can we establish the possibility of its fulfilment?

St Paul proceeds to use two illustrations to make plain the break between the old and the new, and to demonstrate that our former obligation to the Law, though itself ended, gives

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us no reason for indulging in the sins which Law forbids. Sin was in some sense a slavery: from such enslavement to continue in sin would be not only to forfeit our new freedom but to renounce our new service to God, to prefer death to life. So, too, we can illustrate our changed status from marriage. A widow on her husband's death ceases to be bound to him: it is now no adultery if she marry again. We who have been fruitful in sin are new wedded to God in Christ; and the new life transforms our whole relationship. To dally with evil is to betray it.

Such examples, though less unsatisfactory than the strained analogies and academic quibblings of the letter to the Galatians, do not really convey any convincing evidence of insight. St Paul, if less rabbinical and unimaginative than in his first treatment of the subject, has not the kind of sympathetic understanding that can present us with the vivid pictures of human situations that characterize the parables of Jesus. His metaphors are commonplace and inexact; and the effect of them is pedantic and unconvincing. But at this point, and with remarkable power, he suddenly breaks out into genuine and very impressive self-revelation; and the whole problem of the moral conflict comes to life for us, and an illumination as brilliant as those in the three flashes of genius in Galatians is presented. At once we see a real and sensitive person confronting an issue both profound and universal. The 'war in our members' is a passage that strikes to the heart of life.

It is typical of Pauline exegesis that the commentators should think it of primary importance to argue that the Apostle is of course recollecting the agonies of his unconverted state, when he was still struggling to fulfil the Law and finding not only the experience of failure, but the fact that prohibition was itself an incentive. His analysis of the conflit when he admits the obvious rightness of the Law and its value in defining sin for him, and yet is unable to repress

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his impulse to defy it, and is gripped by the seeming hopelessness of resistance -- 'the evil that I would not, that I commit: I serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve only the law of sin. Miserable wretch that I am, who will rescue me from the body of this death?' (Rom. 7.20-24) -- wrings from him language of tragic poignancy. Here is matter of life and death for us all. We have no power of ourselves to help ourselves, and self-reliance both blinds our insight and increases our impotence.

We need not discuss at length the arguments used to show that this is reminiscence of the past, not experience in the present. It may be that in the lives of the saints there is room for the doctrine of assurance, for that certainty of their own salvation which so easily becomes an intolerable effrontery. It certainly is the fact that in the very discovery, past or present, of their failure they regain freedom from self-concernand unbroken consciousness of God. But in view of the cry of dereliction upon Calvary, and what seems at least to be the universal insight of the saints, sensitiveness to evil increases with growth in the knowledge and love of God. And in St Paul's own case humility certainly increases with his growth in grace. Whether or no the phrase in 1 Tim. 1.15 'sinners, of whom I am chief' genuinely reflects the Apostle's mind, at least it is in accord with the whole movement of his Epistles. He too is aware that he needs forgiveness and may yet be a cast-away.

In any case he has given us a searching exposition of our moral problem, of the difference between legal and personal ethics and of the obvious if unrecognized fact that men are not made virtuous by Act of Parliament, since weakness of will, more than lack of knowledge, is the chief cause of error. Moral tension has rarely been more vividly and honestly described; and few even among the saints have exposed their own struggles more objectively and intimately. Here is

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the real experience of a very sincere psychologist. Granted the truth of his basic conviction about the significance of Jesus, this is surely a truthful account of his effect and infuence upon his followers. Here is a God-centred ethic for a world of men like ours, and an account of it, incomplete at this stage of his treatment, but at least facing and analysing problem of which recent scientific discoveries have made us aware.

For the study of Christian ethics this matter of the scope and value of law is one that demands fresh attention. The need for formulated standards of conduct capable of being maintained and applied would seem to most of us evident enough. A world without such standards has been sufficiently manifested during the last twenty years. But the legal maxim 'hard cases make bad law', which was almost universally accepted fifty years ago, and is still regarded by many as the inevitable price of legal justice, has been challenged and perhaps overthrown by our new knowledge of genetics psychology. That 'we are what our gametes determine us', even if it does not quite imply that 'two kleptomaniac parents cannot have an honest child', is a statement that justice cannot ignore. Penal treatment of the hereditarily conditioned (that is of all humanity) must take these conditions into account. And similarly with psychology. know that we are all 'hard cases', indeed in the language of the old fashioned theologian 'sinners', coming into the world with an infinitely long and originally animal ancestry exposed from birth to influences and events which leave mark deep upon our subconscious lives. If we are not all mad, we are none of us wholly sane; and a true justice must be adjusted to the knowledge that behind every action lie complex behaviour-patterns and a unique individual. How such conditions are compatible with the traditional administration of statute-law is an issue on which we seem very far

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front any clear solution. Meanwhile judges, mitigating so far as they can the strict and often gravely inequitable effects of legal definition, create a body of case-law which makes their own task almost impossible.

Moreover, for too many of us, who are vaguely aware the law if not an ass is often cruelly inadequate, the sort of problems which St Paul discusses and to which on any showing he has made so honest a contribution, are a warning that his words do not deal merely with the relation of Jew to Gentile or of Moses to Jesus in the first century. They raise issues of profound and very pressing importance for individual and corporate welfare, and fundamental for any consideration of Christian morality.

In St Paul's case the psychology of his exposition takes us near the centre of the problem. Yet we cannot but feel that though his reaction of thankfulness and deliverance is emotionally valid and compelling, it is not in itself conclusive. How does man replace the guidance and detailed discipline of the Law? How is he to build up an equally compelling moral incentive? Can the love of God and the casting-out of self lead on to a full replacement of the contents of law and to the intelligent acceptance of a fully Christian ethic? St Paul strikes here a note of confidence; only in his last epistles did he show how love and community generate 'full knowledge'.

In the third section, beginning with the triumphant assertion 'So there is now nothing in the way of condemnation for those in Christ Jesus' (Rom. 8. 1), he outlines his own solution first in terms of the discussion in a previous section and then by developing his philosophy of history. In both his thought reaches its highest level of insight and of expression. The former of them is a development of his previous thinking, the latter, so far as I know, is unique in Scripture, original and most illuminating.

Over against the law of sin and death, the standard from

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which men have been freed, he sets what he calls the law of *c spirit of life in Christ Jesus, that is the standard expressed by Christ and imparted by him to those who commit themselves to him and so incorporate his Spirit. The Law weakened as he has shown by our physical nature could not effect the necessary relief: God by the mission of his Son, incarnate in our sinful flesh and concerned with our sin, has condemned sin in the flesh by revealing its sinfulness and so accomplished the vindication of the Law which was fulfilled in us who walk not in flesh but in spirit. 'You are not in flesh but in spirit if God's Spirit dwells in you. If anyone has not Christ's Spirit, be is not his. If Christ be in any of you, his body is dead in regard to sin, his spirit is alive in regard to righteousness. If God's Spirit dwells in you then he who raised Christ Jesus will quicken your mortal bodies through his indwelling Spirit' (Rom. 8.9-11). More than this, all who are thus led by the Spirit are God's family, his heirs, and joint-heirs with Christ sharing his sufferings and his glory. His Spirit and ours join in witness of this. So the essential unity of the Godhead and of as in the Godhead is established; and the Church is defined not in terms of institutions and ceremonies but of spiritual and personal relationships.

And that is not the whole story: the principle thus established of the unity of all real life can be applied to a larger field. If suffering for Christ and for us is the prelude to glory, may not this be true also of the creation as a whole? 'The creation is waiting expectantly for the manifestation of the family of God. The creation was put in subjection to frustration not through its own will but in accordance with him who made it so subject, in hope that the creation itself will be released from servitude to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God' (Rom. 8.19-21) -- freedom, glory, community. We know that all the creation is groaning and travailing together until now; and not only creation but

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we, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan in o as we wait for the adoption which involves the redemption of our bodily life. It is by hope that we have been saved, ad though our hope is not yet fulfilled we wait for it with fortitude. Moreover we are not alone: in our weakness God's Spirit is involved with us, intervening on our behalf and guiding our aspirations; and God searching our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit that he intervenes as God wills for the saints. 'And we know that for those who love God all things co-operate for good, that is for those called according to his purpose',1 God chose them and set them apart to be fashioned after the image of his Son, so that he becomes the firstborn of many brethren, and those whom he set apart he also called, and justified, and glorified. It is all of God; and therefore is above challenge or opposition. If God has given us his Son, he will surely give us all else. Who will separate us from such love? Surely no affliction can do so -- not death nor life nor angels nor rules, nor present nor future, nor powers nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing: God's love in Christ Jesus our Lord stands.

It is unnecessary and would be wrong to read into this remarkable passage the cosmology of Tellhard de Chardin or a modem doctrine of evolution. St Paul no doubt has in mind the story of the curse upon the earth and its human inhabitants in Genesis 3, and was perhaps influenced by the Stoic doctrine of progress which was being proclaimed by his contemporary Seneca. But, even so, the originality, the truth and the relevance for us of his interpretation stand out as in the best sense prophetic. He has fastened upon four points of permanent, and for his day unparalleled, importance.

First he sees creation not as an act accomplished once for all in the beginning, but as a process originally conditioning

1 Rom. 8.28. The variation of reading

does not seriously allect the meaning.

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its development and still being worked out. It is and always has been incomplete, falling short of its full possibilities, frustrate and defective.' Hence it is the scene of agony and effort as it aspires in pain towards the attainment of its true end.

Secondly, this frustration has about it the quality of pregnancy: the agony is a travail: creation labours to bring to birth a community which is not yet in being. This, when born, will be free, not enslaved to its own passions nor spoiled by its past errors, free for fulness of life and the radiance of a reflected glory. It will be the family, the world-wide family, of God. Now in its mid-career it lives in and by hope; and it has already received in Jesus the first fulfilment of its goal. This hope, thus enhanced, is our comfort and means of advance.

Thirdly, in our adventure we are not alone. God is not a distant spectator watching the conflict and praising or condemning its participants. He is himself involved. His Spirit is engaged alongside and within the effort, sharing in its agony and inspiring its direction. With us and in us is the divine, manifested in Christ and dwelling in his people.

Finally, therefore, however fierce and prolonged the struggle -- and our freedom is an essential element which must be preserved and can delay or advance its progress -- the end is sure. God is involved, and his will is being done. That will is love; therefore its operation is conditioned by our status as persons: we are not slaves nor machines and God cannot deny his own nature by treating us as if we were such. The agony continues until we find our perfect freedom in the doing of his will and the service of his community. But even now two things are clear. The world is so conditioned that, as Jesus put it, if we seek first God's reign and righeousness, everything that we need will be available for us --

1 Cf. Sanday and Headiam, Romans, p. 208.

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things spiritual and material co-operate for good if we love God. Moreover here and now nothing that can happen can ever separate us from that love, except our disbelief in it or rejection of it. Unless we say there is no such thing as progress, or there are conditions in which the love of God cannot be fulfilled -- unless that is we abandon hope -- there is, in spite of and in the midst of all the evil and frustration, no rupture of the love with which God binds us to himself.

It is hardly necessary to do more than to remind ourselves how much of our present distresses and heresies are due to the almost complete neglect of this Pauline understanding of the natural world. From the conflicts over Genesis and geology or over Darwinism and evolution to those at the present moment between liberalism and neo-orthodoxy, we can see how strong a light is thrown upon both sides by the section with which St Paul concludes the theological chapters of his greatest epistle.

The interlude which illustrates the pattern of life by death as a reading of history is a cri du coeur from one who not for nothing called himself a Hebrew of Hebrews. If aspiration and agony is our destiny and if God makes all work together for good, how is it that the chosen people, so privileged and so enduring, when their hope was fulfilled, rejected it? The tragedy of that refusal is evident to every Christian: for St Paul it was only underlined by his conversion and subsequent experience. What can he say about it?

That Israel has always been stubborn, that the Old Testament is full of warnings, and that in times of crisis only a remnant has chosen rightly, is cold comfort: the issue has been too catastrophic for easy acceptance. Yet the fact remains; and God must have some purpose in it. Surely his meaning, though no man can know his mind, is to be seen in the fact that it was the Jewish refusal of Jesus that led to the bringing in of the Gentiles. Can it not be claimed that their

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self-exclusion from Christ opened the way for the mission to the rest of the world? If so, in some sort it has a sacrificial value: their loss has been the Gentiles' gain. The rather strained simile of the olive whose own branch has been broken off to make room for a graft from a wild olive expresses his meaning, in spite of its horticultural absurdity.

Moreover their exclusion is not the end: God's mercy will prevail upon them and they will be restored when the Gentiles have gained their full place in Christ. And if their estrangement has worked such good for others, how great will be the fulfilment when they return. From God and through God and unto God are all things. The section ends with the clearest possible statement of the universalism to which Paul's concept of God in Christ has been inescapably leading him, the concept which he develops in Colossians and Ephesians, but which it is so hard for his traditionalist commentators to accept.

The practical and ethical consequences of the good news thus interpreted fill the rest of the letter. Its first concern is with the fundamental quality of the members of the blessed community whose bodily lives are a living sacrifice to God, and who thus dedicated have still to live on earth. 'You must not be adjusted to this world but be transformed by the renewal of the mind, so as to examine what is the will of God in its goodness, its power to satisfy, and its perfection. Each one among you must learn not to think too much of himself, but to think soberly, each with a sense of proportion. For as in a single body we have many members, and every member has a different function, so we who are ourselves many are one body in Christ, and each of us are members of one another' (Rom. 12.2-5).

Those three sentences go to the root of the matter. Jesus had said: 'Change your outlook.' His disciple says: 'You are liable to accommodate yourselves to worldly ideas and

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standards: your whole outlook must be attuned to awareness of the presence and will of God. This involves liberation from self-centredness, and knowledge of oneself in relation to God and the community.' In this community we can find our fun scope, and proper activity. If we compare this with the psychologists' familiar slogan 'Know thyself, accept thyself, be thyself', we shall realize the wide and vital difference between them.

He follows up these general principles by two lists explaining first the varying functions which the members in their service of God are to fulfil and then the qualities which they will display in their dealings one with another. These lists correspond to the outward and the inward duties of members and to the two directions, radial and tangential, of their activities: but inevitably the two exist side by side. Then he appends a string of brief precepts bearing upon attitude and behaviour towards those outside, and summed up in the phrase: 'Do not be conquered by evil but conquer evil with good' (Rom. 11.2 1). His advice gives the picture of a gentle, sympathetic, harmonious and peaceful life -- what he has previously described as a ministry of reconciliation.

The next paragraph (Rom. 13.1-7) passes from pieces of general advice to a specific and at all times urgent and difficult problem: what is to be the attitude of Christians towards the secular authority, in this case to the pagan empire of Rome. Here St Paul follows his previous line and advocates subjection on the ground that there is no authority except by God's sanction and those in office are established by God: so he that resists the authority sets himself against the decree Of God, and will bring judgment upon himself. Rulers have no terror for the good but for the bad. The ruler is God's minister for goodness; for evil he bears the sword. He is God's minister; so you pay taxes; for the public services exist for this very purpose, every grade of them.

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It is all very natural for one who had seen and valued the pax Romana and the security which it had imposed, (and this letter was written during the famous quinquennium Neronis AD 54-59, when Seneca and Burrus gave the Empire its best period of government); for one who had lived in Judaea when it was an enemy-occupied country and had seen the futility that rebellion could cause, and the bitterness that occupation involves. Moreover the slaves and petty tradesmen who constituted the little local groups of Christians had no sort of responsibility for or influence upon public affairs. We may be surprised that the Apostle should have applied such language to any of the later Caesars, even if their proconsuls and procurators were on the whole men of integrity. But that we should today take his injunctions as establishing the divine order of every kind of government is surely proof of the error of assuming that in a continually and radically changing environment infallible rules for details of conduct can be laid down once and for all. This is, of course, to establish exactly the sort of legalistic system against which St Paul's whole effort was directed; and we have seen how Christians have used the error to justify obedience to any sort of despotism from Calvin's theocracy in Geneva to Hitler's Nazism in Berlin. It is an ironical fact that there is certainly no passage in the whole Epistle that has been so frequently quoted in Christian literature and preaching; and equally certainly none which has produced such monstrous consequences.

It is highly significant that the Apostle seems to have realized himself that, though the ethics of personal relationships must be universally applied -- that, in other words, we must live as Jesus did 'in the Kingdom' -- this involves also living amongst people and events of widely different character, and that to translate the spontaneity and wholeness of personal response into a defined and stereotyped code is to

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destroy its character and, indeed, to attempt the impossible. We are no longer under law but under grace, no longer slaves but free.

For in the next section St Paul insists on this very transformation. He has concluded his paragraph on the civil powers by saying 'pay to all men the debts due to them'. He begins the next with the words 'You are not in debt to anyone, except to love one another. He that loves his neighbour has fulfilled law' (Rom. 13.8). The detailed commandments of the decalogue are all summed up in the injunction to love one's neighbour as oneself: such love works no evil and so is the fulfilment of law. You must wake up now into the new dawn; have done with deeds of darkness and go forward equipped for the day. Clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ and pay no heed to the flesh and its passions.

Finally comes a last exhortation to tolerance towards those who are weak and easily upset. If they have scruples over observances in respect of festivals or food, don't be contemptuous. Christ died for us all. You may easily shock and scandalize by your criticism. Do not judge one another. and may the God of patience and comfort grant you agreement in the way of Christ Jesus that you may glorify him unitedly with one voice!

The concluding chapters tell something of his hopes for them when he comes and of his plan, after he has taken the money collected in Macedonia and Achaia as an offering for the poor of Jerusalem, to visit them on his way to Spain. He writes with affectionate warning, and adds a long list of salutations and messages -- which some think may have been addressed to Ephesus and only attached later to this letter. It is certainly a more personal and extensive greeting than we might expect in a formal and carefully ordered document. But it stresses his pastoral care for individuals as well as for the faith, order and unity of, the church.

VII - THE EXPANSION OF ST PAUL'S THOUGHT

In the last four letters -- the Epistles of the Captivity -- we have little in the way of change but much in the expansion of the central theme. Up till now the concept of Christ's person and work has steadily developed. From the Messiah who has delivered us from the Law and will soon return from heaven to inaugurate the new age, St Paul passed at Corinth into the knowledge that Christ has in fact already revealed for us the God of the new age and initiated us into it. In Romans the method and scope of our initiation and the quality of the community which constitutes the goal of the creative process in Christ has been made clear; the details of the change, 'the way of salvation' as our fathers called it, have been analysed and explained in terms which we have dared to describe as a philosophy of history; but the precise method and scope of this consummation in Christ still awaits discussion.

So it is natural that the two specialized letters, to the Philippians and the Colossians, should deal with the two, fold aspect of the Lord, with Christ, his mind and work, as revealed to us in his ministry, and with Christ as the universal embodiment and archetype of God in his creation. Philippians refers us to Christ in the days of his flesh, to the self-emptying of his acceptance of manhood, and the revolution which by and through his human servitude he has made possible for us. Colossians sees him as not only the fulfilment and prototype of the new humanity but as the image of the invisible God, the veritable presentation of the divine, and as

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the source and consummation of the whole creation. He has thus in this double message traced for us the measure of the fulness of Christ, and described the new outlook and deepened knowledge made available to us in him.

It only remains for the Apostle to develop this vision into a clear picture of the completeness of the whole achievement; to purge out of his theology those pre-Christian and sub-Christian elements which had been drawn from previous systems and metaphors, legal or apocalyptic, regal or mechanical and had found place in earlier interpretations; and to show how in fact the whole range of the divine energy conceivable to man has by God's good pleasure been summed up for us in Christ. In the circular letter which we call Ephesians he has done more briefly what he has done in Romans. He has set out his thought in what is a treatise rather than an epistle, and he has shown how the love and fellowship of the life in Christ equip us with full knowledge both of the whole creative process and of the detailed obligations which our response to it involves.

The little note to Philemon with its intimacy and pastoral message is a fitting postscript to the series. It shows that alongside the greatest theme of Christian faith the Apostle can still give his mind to the run-away slave, 'my child begotten in my bonds Onesimus', whom he now sends back to his master.

That deep and dedicated affection for his fellows and followers is nowhere more vividly expressed than in the first of these four letters. Philippi plainly had a very warm place in his heart; and if we are tempted to think of him, especially in his youth, as a trifle exorbitant in his demands for recognition or at times over-eager to criticize and exhort, we must here be convinced of the depths and solicitude of his love. 'God is my witness how I yearn over you all in the compassion of Christ Jesus, and pray that your love may

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abound yet more and more in full knowledge and all sensitiveness so that you may learn discrimination and be sincere and beyond reproach' (Phil. 1.8-10).

The next paragraph shows the same joy. He can tell them how his troubles have resulted in progress for the good news; that his chains have been evidence for Christ in the praetorium and for all the others and that more of the brethren convinced by his imprisonment are daring to speak out God's word more freely. Some proclaim Christ from jealousy, others from goodwill, some out of love, others out of bitterness; but at least Christ is heralded. Indeed, he is magnified in my person whether I live or die. For myself I would rather die and be with Christ; but when I think of you I want to live and some day to see you all again. Only do fulfil your citizenship in a manner worthy of the good news so that, present or absent, I may know that you are standing firm in the one spirit and whole-hearted as athletes of the good news, never overthrown by your adversaries, sharing not only in your trust in Christ but in your sufferings for him, and taking part in the same conflict as you see and hear of in me. So in all our consolation and love and partnership and compassion, you fill me with joy, by your sympathy and unselfishness and concern for others rather than for yourselves.

By this outpouring of his thankfulness he points them to the example of Christ that they may indeed share his very mind and thought. 'Christ, whose status is that of God, did not think it essential to be on equality with God but emptied himself, taking a slave's status and entering the category of man. He was found in shape as man and humbled himself becoming obedient until death, even death on a cross. On that account God exalted him above all, and gave to him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven and earth and hell, and every tongue should confess "Jesus Christ is Lord" to the

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glory of God the Father' (Phil. 23-11). The bare precision of the Grek --- a string of nouns and verbs with hardly a single article in the whole passage -- is untranslatable and gives an impression of concentration and emphasis unparalleled in St Paul's writings. The contrast between divine and human, the greatness of the self-giving, and yet the reality and completeness of the gift are all set out for us. This is not a Christology, as so many later descriptions became, of a divine actor assuming a temporary role. It denotes a complete transformation, the whole status being altered by the fact of the self-emptying, the Kenosis, and only an act of God has exalted and ennobled it.

With this knowledge the beloved community must work out with fear and trembling its own salvation: it is of course God who works in them, both for the original effort of will and for the energy of its execution. Do everything without grumbling and argument: you are God's children in a crooked and distracted world; you must shine, you are torchbearers of the word of life and I shall be proud of you; for I have not run or toiled in vain. 'My offering of sacrifice and service for your faith is being dedicated: I rejoice and share your joy: do you rejoice and share mine' (Phil. 2.17-18). He follows this message of joy with a promise to send Timothy to them and the news that he is now sending Epaphroditus who had come to bring their gifts to, him and who has been seriously ill but is now restored to health.

Then with a further message of joy in the Lord he warns them against specific wrongdoers, self-mutilators who 'boast in the flesh'. 'I could have done that', he says, 'in the old days: but I gave it all up for the overwhelming knowledge of Christ Jesus; I have no righteousness, of my own but only righteousness from God, that I may know Christ, the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings, as I became transformed to his death so as to attain resurrection

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from the dead. I have not yet attained: my brethren, I do not think of myself as having attained: this is the one point; I am forgetting the past, and straining towards the future as I pursue the goal of the high calling: this is what the mature among us think' (Phil. 33-15). That marks the growth of his humility since the days when his heritage and ability gave him cause for boasting.

Finally he warns them more specifically against those, apparently members of the community, who are in fact ,enemies of the cross of Christ, whose end is destruction, whose god is their belly, whose glory is in their shame, who think only of earth' (Phil. 3.18-19), while we are citizens of heaven 1, and are welcoming the Saviour, our Lord Jesus Christ, who will refashion the body of our humiliation that it may be transformed into the body of his glory. Meanwhile they are to rejoice -- and he repeats the watchword of the epistle. Let your courtesy ('sweet reasonableness' as Matthew Arnold rendered it) be known to all. Do not be anxious -- so St Paul, on whom care had weighed heavy, repeats his Master's constant admonition. Let God know your requests -- in thankfulness. And his peace which surpasses all intellectualism will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. 'And for the rest, my brethren, whatever is true, whatever reverend, whatever righteous, whatever holy, whatever lovable, whatever honourable, wherever there is any virtue or merit, meditate upon these things' (Phil. 4.8). It has been said that this is the only verse in the New Testament which commends to us what we today call 'the values'. In its deepest sense this is surely not the case; the love of God should include all values. But as it stands the verse is an appropriate conclusion to St Paul's exhortations. He has broken down the barrier between law and grace; he has refuted the idea that particular

1 For the pride of Philippi as 'the first city of its district, a Roman colony', see Acts 16.12.

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regulations and precepts can define the whole content of our obligation; he has now grasped that all the world of our contemplation is material for the exercise of the love of it; and that this love is universally appropriate. It is highly significant that in what may well be his last Epistle he draws final attention to the values which all recognize and that without distinction of race or religious setting he commends them. to the thought and practice of the Church.

So the way of love moves full-circle. Those for whom such love is first revealed as they see and experience it interpreted by, and incarnate in, Christ can come to see it, in spite of the evidence of suffering and of sin, in the universe itself. And we -- the pagans who are apt to take our impressions from the world around us and dare not move on to acclaim love in God or to confess Christ as his image -- we may at least start at the other end, and say with Meredith

Into the heart of that which made the rose Shall I, with shuddering, fall?

And so from the hints of perfection, the self-evident value, of the world we may be encouraged to discover those values harmonized, intelligible and explanatory in the Christ for whom all our world is the preparation. It is with this new insistence that we should meditate upon all the worth disclosed in the world of our experience, that he correlates the vision of the cosmic significance of Christ which is his, theme in Colossians and Ephesians.

This is the point in which the growth of his insight since writing to the Romans is most manifest. Then, in facing the fact of redemption from sin to grace, he had affirmed the deliverance from weakness of will and instability of conduct into the ecstasy of the freedom of the Spirit. But he had not shown how this experience produced new standards of value, new discrimination between good and evil and a new and compelling ethical obligation. Now, by elaborating our need

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to enter into the mind of Christ as this is revealed in Jesus and perpetuated in the community of his Body, he answers the question as to the source, character and contents of Christian ethics. We are not given a new decalogue, or any system of moral ceremonial or dogmatic precepts. But neither are we left to our own 'free' choice, to the antinomianism and speculations of our individual ideas. Love of God and neighbour, solidarity with the blessed community, life 'in Christ', give us the perfect criterion for heart and mind and will. We 'perceive and know what things we ought to do'.

For Philippi the Apostle's concern had been to establish dais solidarity of the community, to overcome the individualism and so prevent the factions which were the besetting weaknesses of all Greek societies. Stasis, the perpetual outbreaks of sectarian and political strife, had been, as their historians realized, the ruin of the Hellenic world. It had sever produced a larger or more stable society than the citystate; and this -- though at its best and for a short time, like Athens in the age of Pericles, it might rise to splendid heights of brilliance -- had never any security of survival or in fact any freedom from internal strife. St Paul had seen at Corinth the immediacy of the growth of rival parties -- 'I am of Paul', 'I of Apollos', 'I of Peter' (I Cor. 1.12) -- and in fact the church there, for all its merits, never became a great centre. So in Macedonia the Greek habit of argument, controversy and schism had plainly shown itself, and he set himself to overcome it by appeal to the selflessness of Christ and by the fostering of brotherly affection and loyalty. It is evidence of his profound conviction that the building up of the body of Christ is the essential task of discipleship, is indeed its very life and meaning, that he spends this most joyous of all his letters upon this one purpose. He must at all costs constrain his readers to recognize and experience the fulness of Christ in their personal relationships, and to love him so inclusively

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that his presence may transfigure for each of them their whole relationship towards their fellow-members. Schism in the body is disaster, even death, to all members infected with it: by destroying the love that casts out self, it distorts the vision and corrupts the power that constitute true knowledge.

The letter to Colossae, obviously similar in style and occasion and beginning with an almost identical greeting, is also concerned with the fulness of Christ, but in a different connection. It has been called a letter to the Intellectuals; and its objective is to assert the sufficiency of Christ to a community deeply interested in gnostic and theosophical speculations. In it therefore we are introduced to the esoteric type of polytheistic mysticism characteristic of Indian and indeed of most Oriental religion, and playing a large part in the contemporary world of Eastern and Jewish culture, and about to figure largely in the development of the early Church. Gnosticism, as it has come to be called in its Christian form, was prevalent and powerful among the Mediterranean churches from southern France to Alexandria: it produced many outstanding teachers and a variety of different sects, and absorbed the attention and hostility of many of the early Fathers from Irenaeus to Epiphanius. The wisest of the orthodox theologians, Clement of Alexandria and Origen, realized that behind all the 'genealogies' and jargon were elements of significance and value -- as we shall no doubt discover afresh when Christianity becomes native again in the Eastern world. The rigid dogmatists were mainly content with violence and superficialities: they expelled the Gnostics without understanding them. In consequence, from that day to this the general outlook and characteristics of esotericism have continually reappeared. They take widely different forms and are expressed in a multitude of institutions, appealing in general to people sensitive, psychic and

often almost saintly in temperament -- but also, to the introverted, the exhibitionist and the charlatan. We know nothing, and the letter tells us little, about the particular beliefs of the Colossians, except that they combined elaborate classifications of the planes of the unseen world -- 'thrones, lordships, rulers and powers' (Col. 1.16) -- with strict observance of rules for food and drink, for festivals, new moons and sabbaths, for things clean and unclean. It was plainly the sort of eclecticism so familiar today when horoscopes and astrology, palmistry and spiritualism, yoga and reincarnation, tranquillizers and mescalin, separately or in combination, all have their advocates.

To the disciples at Colossae whom he had never personally visited St Paul proclaims Christ in terms of God's 'mystery' or self-revelation,' and as himself the 'fulness' or totality 2 or the divine. He had, as his letters abundantly prove, a habit o picking up and employing terms appropriate to the localy and the interests of his readers; we need not, I think, be deeply concerned to define their precise technical meaning, and for our purpose to do so would be of little importance. The significance of his main position and its relevance for today are obvious. These theosophists could readily find place for Jesus as a Mahatma or Lord of the inner life alongside of the other members of their extensive hierarchy. In days when the churches had not evolved any clearly formulated creed or gone through the long doctrinal controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries, acceptance by them of a high place for the Christ in a Gnostic system, or even in the Greco-Roman pantheon, might have seemed a suitable

1 The word as used in this Epistle seems to have no connection with the specific mystery-religions.
2 Pleroma is itself a technical term of Gnosticism: hence St Paul's use of it here is necessarily more specialized than in Ephesians or elsewhere. Cf. C. L. Mitton, Ephesians, pp. 94-7.

settlement of the claims made for him. But to accept it would be not only to break with Jewish monotheism and impair Christ's uniqueness, but to deny -- what to St Paul was now radical -- the basic difference between God as Father and the 'gods many and lords many' of paganism, or between law and grace, and so to destroy the whole concept of integration in the body of Christ and the 'scheme of salvation' set out in the Epistle to the Romans. So he meets them by continuing the theme of the cosmic and universal significance of Christ and adopts language to describe it which implies a further advance of his understanding of Jesus, and prepares for the exposition in the Epistle to the Ephesians of him as the atonement and consummation of the whole creative process, It is in this sense of the unity of all our world of experience, as this unity is disclosed to us in Christ, that we may hope to find a basis for the conscious integration of our outlook and way of life, and in doing so to recover for Christendom a larger vision of the scale and proportion of the faith.

The opening of the Epistle, beyond its record of their reception of the good news from St Paul's colleague Epaphroditus, contains nothing peculiar to Colossae except that it sounds the key-note of what is to come. If Philippians is a letter of joy in the mind of Christ, this is concerned with the knowledge for which they are enquiring and which St Paul sets himself to supply, the 'further knowledge of the gracious gift of God in truth', 'the further knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual insight so as to walk worthily of the Lord, bearing fruit in every good work and so increasing still more in this full knowledge of God' (Col. 1.6; 9-10). He thus links mental with moral advance and insists that speculation is concerned not with intellectual problems only but with personal relationships and their ethical development. It is in God's light that we prisoners of darkness find our release into the realm of the Son of his love who is 'the image of God the

unseen, first born of all creation, since in him all things have been created in the heavens and on the earth, things seen and unseen, thrones, lordships, rulers, powers: all have been created through him and unto him: he exists before them all; they all cohere in him; he is the head of the body, the Church: he is the starting-point and ruler, the first-born from the dead, that he may have the primacy in all things because in him all the totality was pleased to dwell and through him to reconcile all things both on the earth and in the heavens, making peace through the blood of his cross' (Col. 1. 1520).

Praying that they may stand firm in the universal gospel of which he Paul is a minister, he describes his own afflictions as a filling up of whatever is lacking in the afflictions of Christ 'in my own flesh for the sake of his Body' (Col. 1.24) and his own ministry as given to him in the economy of God to fill up the word of God, this mystery hidden from the ages and the generations and now revealed to his saints, the mystery which is Christ in us the hope of glory, so that every man may be 'full-grown' in Christ (cf. Eph. 4.13).

The acceptance of Christ as Lord means the complete dedication of life: we proceed in him, founded and constructed in him and buttressed by the faith as you have been taught it. 'Be on guard that no one seduce you by his philosophy and meaningless sophistry in line with human tradition and elementary speculations instead of with Christ. It is in him that the whole totality of the Godhead resides embodied: you share the totality in him: he is the Head of all rule and power: in him you were initiated with a circumcision not wrought with hands, in the putting off of the body of flesh, in the circumcision which is Christ's: you have been buried with him in your baptism, and in him also you have been raised up through your faith in the energy of God who raised him from the dead: he has annulled the legal indictment against you and nailed it to his cross: he has deposed from you the rulers

and powers and displayed them openly in his triumph over them on it' (Col. 2.8-15).

So he can reproach them for their relapse into observances and superstitions into which they have been enticed by professed angel-worshippers: this means that they have broken away from 'their Head from whom the whole body supplied and sustained by its joints and muscles will grow with the growth of God' (cf. Eph. 4.16). Union with Christ will save them from dogmatizing about ritual niceties as from fantasies and mock humility and contempt of the body -- a different thing from the respect due to the flesh for its proper use. 'Your life is hidden with Christ in God: when Christ is manifested, then our life and you will be manifested with him in glory' (Col. 3.34). Here is the last relic of eschatology, and it plainly identifies the coming of Christ with the manifesting of his Body. Our union is not a fixed and final Second Advent, but here and now, as and when his presence is realized on earth.

He concludes with a detailed account of the moral qualities and conduct that union with Christ involves. First on its negative side, bodily passions and indulgence and the greed which is evidence of idolatry 'provoke the wrath of God' -- that is, are a rebellion against him. With them must go wrath, envy, malice, blasphemy and foul talk. Truth must control all our relationships. The old manhood and its ways are done with; the new consists in the full knowledge which reflects the Creator; and in him there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, barbarian nor Scythian, slave nor free; racial, ritual, linguistic and social barriers are transcended; Christ is all in all. Compassion, mercy, humility, gentleness, fortitude, forbearance, generosity, forgiveness like that of the Lord, and above all love which he here describes as the cement of maturity and fulness of growth -- these will accomplish for you the peace of Christ: be thankful. Christ's word should dwell within you abundantly and in

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all wisdom: teach and learn by use of psalms and hymns and spiritual tunes; sing in your hearts to God. 'All that you say or do, let all of it be in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father by him' (Col. 3.17).

After a few short sentences of instruction to wives and husbands, children and parents, slaves (at greater length) and masters; an exhortation to prayer and remembrance of him in his trial; a commendation of Tychicus; and a number of greetings and salutations, he closes with his blessing. It is not unfair to say that the same lack of creative imagination which made it impossible for St Paul to illustrate his exposition by lifelike and illuminating examples also gives a dulness and formalism to his exhortations towards the social obligations of our dependence one upon another. Jesus in his longer parables, and not least in those that have raised difficulties like the Unjust Steward or the Labourers in the Vineyard, makes us vividly aware of the matter at issue, holds our interest and arouses our sympathy; St Paul speaking about marriage or slavery says the obvious and conventional in a way that seems at variance with his emphasis upon love and forbearance and the sharing of burdens.

It is indeed to us a remarkable thing that with regard to slavery at least the Apostle shows such insensitiveness. Apart from a few verses in 1 Corinthians, the remarks made here (and expanded in Ephesians) alone show any sign of what we should regard as the shocking treatment of slaves in the Roman world and especially of the handicaps which it placed upon the personal, moral and religious life of the enslaved. No doubt a well-to-do Jew brought up to observe the regulations on the treatment of the slave in the Old Testament would not be familiar with the I of the civil order or the tyranny, lasciviousness and cruelty of private slaveowners, but it is hard to realize how little the social system and social iniquities of the time influenced a man so strict in

his individual ethics and so affectionate in his human relationships. There are few points on which a modem Christian will realize more obviously the change both of the social c conscience and of our attitude to the importance and the effects of corporate evil. It is only when we read the very wise treatment of the subject in Lord Lindsay's The Two Moralties,1 or remember that John Newton, the author of 'How sweet the name of Jesus sounds', was a sea-captain actively engaged in the slave-trade, that we can appreciate that St Paul's stress upon the character and primacy of Christian love, and his insistence that in Christ there is a realm of true family-life for all, has at least in this respect proved ultimately triumphant.

Of this family-life St Paul, in spite of all that has been said about his puritanism and misogyny, plainly states that marriage is its highest expression and example: 'husbands love your wives as Christ loved the Church' (Eph. 5.25). As we have seen, he treats the degradation of the sex-relationship as the first consequence of human apostasy: to degrade religion is to degrade parenthood (Rom. 1.20-25). He is one of the first to recognize the equal love-rights of both partners (1 Cor. 7.3,4). There is in him no suggestion that wedded love is sensuous or lustful, no evidence of the contrast between eros and agapé which has been affirmed by Dr Nygren and is the fatal flaw in the sexual philosophy of D. H. Lawrence. We must not let the sternness of his warnings against promiscuity, prostitution and perversions or his acceptance in some measure of the subordination of women blind us to the general wholesomeness of his attitude or the sincerity of his idealism.

The letter is of high value as vindicating and enlarging the claim of the universality and sufficiency of Christ and so as enabling the fuller presentation of it in his more general

1 pp. 63-75.

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letter to the Ephesians -- which is a circular treatise not directed to a specific place or situation. But as a treatment the type of speculation prevalent at Colossae, and so of Gnosticism generally, it necessarily suffers from the Apostle's strictly Jewish upbringing and temperamental preference for logical definition. He knew the Hebrew scripture interpretation: he had some acquaintance with Greek and Stoic thought. He had quite evidently no first hand knowledge of esotericism, and no natural appreciation of the type of experience that it expresses. So he cannot go deeply into the reasons which make it attractive to so many individuals and races: he cannot sympathize with the psychic endowment that finds in this type of mysticism a natural and not inappropriate method of describing and analysing human experience. Nearly all of us Western peoples, alike by inheritance and by education, share St Paul's ignorance: we do not know enough to discriminate the expert from the charlatan, and if we touch the subject at all are either beglamoured or disgusted by it. In the main we dismiss the whole issue as he did, regarding it at best as the product of an abnormal imagination or a revival of outworn superstitions and at worst as a deliberate exploitation of human credulity by persons either mercenary or exhibitionist. There is still an urgent need, not only for psychic research in the more restricted sense but for the bringing together of representative thinkers, Eastern and Western, as was done at the Colloque Orient-Occident in Brussels at the time of the Exhibition. But this side of the problem will not be fully understood until Christians have adopted towards the esoteric a very different attitude from that of St Paul. In affirming the universality of Christ they must see that Hindu and Buddhist philosophy deserve sympathetic study and interpretation. These also belong to God's world, and can surely help us to appreciate it.

VIII - THE FULNESS OF CHRIST

The last of the series of letters universally described as Pauline, whether or no it is actually by St Paul, is the treatise known as 'to the Ephesians'. This consists of a revised, and in some respects more profound, exposition both of the full significance of life in Christ and of the ethical qualities of the consequent relationships. It is by some scholars regarded as a recapitulation and summary of the Apostle's teaching; by others, and perhaps more justly, as its consummation. It is obviously closest to Colossians, of which its final sections are often almost a repetition: but in its theology it involves an extension and generalization of the thoughts set out in the two epistles examined in the previous chapter. It contains a rhapsody as splendid as that in 1 Corinthians 13. Probably no passage of Scripture more perfectly describes the ideal community.

That it is the last of St Paul's writings implies two points -- that the Epistle to the Hebrews is from an unnamed author differing widely from him in temperament and theology, familiar with Greek rather than rabbinic thinking, and dealing with problems and circumstances unlike those of the Apostle; and that the 'Pastoral Epistles' (1 and 11 Timothy and Titus), though much closer to his environment and containing many Pauline phrases and reflections, are the work of a disciple whose interest is in maintaining tradition and standardizing administration. It is very difficult to fit the allusions in these three Pastoral Epistles into what we know of the Apostle's subsequent history, and harder still to believe that he lost so completely his range of vision, his confidence in the future

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and his temperament and passion. For this writer the Church has become an institution with its officers and conventions, its parochialism and its conservatism. In any estimate of St Paul's achievement these documents cannot be used with confidence, nor do they make any great contribution.

But, as we have mentioned, the authenticity of Ephesians is not universally accepted even among generally orthodox scholars; and the interesting hypothesis put forward with increasing detail by Dr E. J. Goodspeed has strengthened their doubts by supplying a definite exposition of its character and the circumstances of its composition.' He associates it with the collection and publishing of the Pauline Letters, late in the first century, and regards it as an introduction to the volume, composed by a 'Paulianist', particularly familiar with Colossians but quoting from the nine other Letters and Luke-Acts. His theory, amplified by other scholars, draws attention to the importance of Ephesians as an introduction to and recapitulation of Pauline teaching. But it is in danger of representing the Epistle as a patchwork of words and phrases culled from the series and lacking in originality or novelty. For those who are upset by the difference of style between Ephesians and the other genuine letters, there is a real problem to be faced. But Goodspeed overstates his case for deliberate copying, and assumes a literary background for the New Testament books more appropriate to a modern research-student with his bibliographies and library than to the Christians of the first century. He also refuses to admit the growth of St Paul's thought in the Epistle, in spite of pointing out correctly that certain words used in Ephesians show a slightly developed meaning from that found elsewhere -- a development fully consistent with its genuineness. He ignores the grandeur and originality of Chapters 3 and 4; and he

1 E. J. Goodspeed, The Meaning of Ephesians (University of Chicago Press).

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hardly faces the crucial evidence of Eph. 3.14, where St Paul explicitly claims to have previously written the letter to the Colossians which in accordance with Col. 4.16 he assumes that his readers in Laodicea have already received and from which he quotes the precise words 'economy' and 'mystery' of Col. 1.25,26. If it is admitted that Ephesians was a circular letter or treatise like Romans, and that Marcion was justified in calling it 'to the Laodiceans', we can safely pronounce this learned and ingenious hypothesis as not proven. What are we to say further? As we have seen, scholars who have disputed its genuineness have done so partly on account of its marked difference in style, and partly from the fact that most of it contains matter similar both in meaning and often in vocabulary to what he has already written. That the scribe who actually produced the original script is not Tertius who wrote Romans (Rom. 16.22), or the one used for Philippians and Colossians, can hardly be disputed. The very long sentences linked in a succession of connected phrases are unlike anything that the Apostle sent elsewhere. This writer strings together into unbroken paragraphs long sections of discourse which are elsewhere reported in short and separate, but often repetitive, sentences. It does not, I think, make for ease of reading or of understanding: but it gives a smoothness of rhythm unlike the brevity of its predecessors. Of its matter, though a student producing a digest might have written much of it, there are a few strikingly new phrases and a least two Ionizer passages which are original and creative, and also in full harmony with the trends of the Apostle's thought which they develop. A treatise rather than a letter sent first to Laodicea, written shortly after Colossians and with a definite reference to it, 1 but dictated to a different scribe and in a more tranquil mood -- that is perhaps the account that best de-

1 Eph. 3.3, referring to Col. 1.25-6: cf. C. Gore, Ephesians, pp. 11-0-1.

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scribes it. Its theme, like the theme of its predecessors is unity in Christ, the unity of nature and conduct in diversity of function and of equipment which constitutes the blessed community of his Body and the consummation of his nature and purpose. It is clearly a circular letter, not addressed to Ephesus where the Apostle had lived and worked so long: it contains no salutations nor names except that of Tychicus who presumably carried it, and no local references or specific instructions.

Psychologically it reads like an elderly man's work: its author looks back from a distance upon the passions and perils of the past, repeats the phrases that embody the high lights of his experience, and weaves his memories into the fabric of his full vision. There is a sense of completeness about the resultant message; the penitence for his persecution of the Church, the poignancy of his lamentation for Israel, the tension of his struggles against evil and assault these, though still evident, no longer break the calm of his spirit. If he has not yet attained, he has at least reached sight of his goal: he can see his life's work as a whole and can recapitulate and consummate it as he proclaims the fact of the universality and oneness in Christ of the whole cosmic order. He is one who is now entering into, the peace of God, and summons his followers to act in accordance with that peace.

After a simple salutation the Epistle starts with a paragraph of twenty-four printed lines of Greek not containing a single full-stop and demanding careful reading. The first section of it is an act of worship setting out the praise of God in three headings, each introduced by a participle. 'Blessed be God who has blessed us by his choice of us before the foundation of the world to be saints, who has separated us for adoption in Christ Jesus according to the good will of his purpose ... who has made known to us the "mystery" (open secret) of his purpose for the "economy" (right use) of the

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totality of time, to consummate all things in Christ, things in the heavens and on the earth' (cf. Eph. 1.3-10). The new stress here is in the emphasis on God's foreordaining purpose, a theme touched upon in Romans 8 but here related to the whole movement of God's will. Our vocation is an expression of the divine plan for the world; it is not envisaged in terms of predestination in the sense of individual selection, for it is controlled by God's universal love and this necessarily involves our freedom as sons not slaves or robots. It does not, as stated here, imply that others are not selected, or are destined to damnation. Rather, Paul sees the whole creative process as purposive, occupying in the divine economy the complete expanse of time and disclosing its unity and fulfilment in Christ. He goes on to, define his own status in Christ ,in whom we have been given inheritance, separated according to the plan of him who accomplishes all things according to the intention of his purpose so that we exist for the praise of his glory -- we who have already set our hope on Christ' (Eph. 1.11-12). He concludes by direct reference to his readers. 'In Christ you also have heard the word of truth, the good news of your salvation; in him you have put your faith and been sealed by the Spirit of his promise, the Holy One, the guarantee of our inheritance, unto the redemption of his possession and the praise of his glory' (Eph. 1.13-14).

There follows an almost equally long sentence expressing his prayers for them that God will give them the spirit of wisdom and revelation in full knowledge of himself, 'that you may know the hope of your calling, the wealth of splendour that you inherit, and the exceeding magnitude of his power towards us who believe, as we see it in relation to the energy of his mighty strength exerted in Christ when he raised him from the dead and placed him on his right hand in the heavenlies, far above all rule and power and authority and lordship and every name that is named in this era or in that which is to

come, and set all things under his feet and gave him as head above all to the church which is his body and the totality of him who fills all in all' (Eph. 1.18-23). Then he reminds then that formerly they walked in evil ways 'according to the era of this world, the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit now at work in the sons of disobedience' (Eph. 2.2), but that now they have been saved by grace through faith, not by their own works, but as God's work created in Christ for the good works that he has made ready for us.

They must always remember that they were once Gentiles, apart from Christ, estranged from the commonwealth of Israel, alien from the covenants of the good news, without hope and without God in the world. Christ had brought you near by his death. He is our peace; he has made Jew and Gentile one, has broken down the wall of partition, and by his embodiment done away with the enmity between them, that is with the law of commandments in decrees, so as to make out of the two one new man. 'So now you are no longer strangers but fellow-citizens with the saints and of God's household, built up upon the foundation of apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the corner-stone in whom the whole building fully integrated will develop into a dwelling-place in the Lord' (Eph. 2.19-22).

The first half of the treatise closes on a moral personal note. Paul, the Lord's prisoner pleads with them to realize how he has come to receive the open secret of Christ, previously unknown but now disclosed to his apostles and prophets, that indeed the Gentiles are now full sharers in the inheritance and body and community of the good news in Christ. 'To me, the very lowest of 0 saints, has this grace been given, to proclaim to the Gentiles the untraceable wealth of Christ' (Eph. 3. 8). So will be made known to the rulers and powers in the heavens through the church the 'many-coloured wisdom' of God. And then to his great prayer:

'On this account I bow my knees to the Father from whom every fatherland in heaven and earth is named, that he will pant you according to the wealth of his glory to, be strengthened with might through his Spirit working upon your inward that Christ may dwell by faith in your hearts in love; so being rooted and grounded you may have strength to apprehend with all the saints what is the full scale, the breadth and length, height and depth, of the love of Christ, and to know that it surpasses all knowledge, that you may be filled up into the totality of God' (Eph. 3.14-19). Thus he commemorates the universality and majesty of the divine, the reality efficacy of his indwelling in us, and consequently the and completeness of the community that is ours. He 'And to him who is able to accomplish exceeding abundantly beyond all that we can ask or think according to such power as works in us, to him be the glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus unto all the generations for ever and ever. Amen' (Eph. 3.20-21).

The second half of the Epistle is a lengthened and strengthened version of that to the Colossians, dealing with the same subjects in the same order and often in the same words. There is thus given a general sketch of the practical expressiom of the universal faith as worked out in the circumstances of simple human lives at the time and in the conditions of the first Christian century. It does not call for detailed comment; for it does not touch the large question of civil obedience discussed in Romans, or add much to the advice already there and elsewhere. But it is preceded by one of the most familiar, and for the last hundred years best loved of all Paul's themes, the rhapsody upon the unity and integration it the Body of Christ, a passage which takes up and completes the hymn to Christian love in I Corinthians, and is the full development of the idea of symbiosis or corporate life first outlined in that letter.

To walk worthy of their calling means for them not only the forbearance one of another in love, but the sustained effort to maintain spiritual unity in the partnership of peace. There is but one body and one spirit; they are united in their vocation and their hope: there is one lord, one faith, me baptism, one God and Father of all who is over all, and through all and in all.

Each one of us has been given his own particular gift and grace: each has his function to weld together the saints for their work of service, to build up the body of Christ, 'till we all attain to the oneness of the faith and of the full knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature humanity, to the measure of the stature of the totality of the Christ. So we shall be no more infants, storm-tossed and swayed by every wind of the teaching directed by human guile and its incitement to the byways of error, but speaking truth in love shall grow up in all respects into him who is our head, even Christ, from whom all the body, harmonized and integrated by the contribution of every joint in it as each part co-operates in due proportion, achieves the growth of the body for its development in love' (Eph. 4.13-16).

At last in these great sentences the biological principle of symbiosis, a new principle at the level of the universal human divine community, has found expression. For us it is the coinherence, the Christification, of mankind in a single organic personality. Like the atoms in the molecule, like the cells in the living creature, like the chromosomes in the zygote, like the analysable elements in the integrated individual, like the several members in the family-life of our dreams, the particular men and women thus combined by the unifying energy of the love of God in Christ emerge as a veritable incarnation of his Spirit in the world. Just as love has been disclosed as capable of release from the twin distortions of exploitation and sentimentality, as a new ful-

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filment of past aspiration and present creativity, and as the attribute of God himself, manifested for us in terms of our own humanity by Jesus and made universally available as we share his Spirit, so now we catch a glimpse of the vast and differing peoples of the world transformed in Christ into the fellowship of a true commonwealth, sharing the same loyalty, serving the same cause, and inspired by the same love. Such a community would live as Jesus lived, in the world but with God; its individuals would find in their membership one of another their own freedom and fulfilment, and its unity would discover for them in the changes and chances of our mortality the permanence of the abiding values and the reality of eternal life.

So disclosed to us, we see it as St Paul did in terms of the fulfilment in Christ of our total humanity, as this finds itself focussed upon, represented by and incarnate in Jesus. We can glimpse his archetypal and universal manhood expanded in the Apostle's vision until it is consummated by an all-inclusive and cosmic manifestation of the divine humanity.

But we must not stop there. The same process is to be recognized in the beginnings of this earth of ours as the ordered story of its origin and development now becomes traceable -- the story of which in its immensity and intricacy we have so recently been made aware. Now at last we are in a position to see its continuity even if the earlier phases of it cannot yet be given detailed explanation. We can at least reject the relics of the old catastrophisms and of the tendency to represent creation as a number of intrusive acts each representing a new and independent epoch. We can affirm that the old dualisms, matter and mind, physical and psychic, inanimate and animate need careful scrutiny, and that instead of a succession of contrasted phases of progress we look for evidence not merely of analogies but of identities, as simple co-ordination manifests increasingly conscious awareness

and co-operation. Now that we begin to understand by what principles the incredible complexity of the DNA molecule attained its full structure and function, we shall inevitably find new insights into the relationship and significance of what we still label as the physical, chemical, psychic and conscious elements in our nature. We should soon be in a position to show how co-ordination, under the primary stimuli of attraction and repulsion, has elaborated simple types of awareness along specialized lines of interpretation such as have led to the methods expressed in the developing sense-organs, and how the precision and communication thus made possible expanded and diversified, but in so doing also limited and distorted, the original ranges of experience.

When St Paul insists that love is the very cement of fullgrown life, and that as it is freely exercised it gives rise to its own expression in terms of the true knowledge which is an objective and proportionate understanding of God and our neighbours, and that this leads to a controlled and coinherent activity within the total community, he projects for us a picture of the whole creative process in terms not of an academic system of thought or of a legalized code of behaviour, but of a way of life in terms which should enable us to resolve the antitheses between individual and society, freedom and order, diversity and unity, through the spontaneous and intricately co-ordinated activity of the whole community in which the totality of its universal life fulfils itself. This vision, as he presented it, was in its range and scale a new concept, fulfilling indeed the Greek aspiration after unity in diversity and its translation into human terms by Plato in the Republic, and foreshadowed for Paul himself more clearly in the prophetic tradition in Israel of the mission and the triumph of the people of God, but establishing the homology of microcosm and macrocosm and the complex harmony

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of the whole with a concreteness and a consistency that no previous seer had revealed.

And if in thus emphasizing the universality of the community we seem to suggest a flat and monotonous sublimation of all peculiarities we must never forget that at every mention of the unity of the organism St Paul is careful to insist upon the necessity and importance of the diversity of function discharged by its manifold parts. Far more than in any subsequent institutional church, the Body of Christ includes and is dependent upon the distinct but cooperative activities of each several member within it. At the first mention of the Body in I Corinthians 12, when he has vindicated the importance of every element in it, he lists eight separate groups of workers -- apostles, prophets, teachers, authorities, healers, helpers, guides and speakers with tongues. In Romans 12, where he omits apostles, he mentions seven 'gifts' not all identical with his earlier list. In Ephesians 4, when he is specially concerned with missionary expansion, he names five types of worker.

The fact is that his whole concept is framed upon the idea of relationships. He refuses the analyst's mistake of splitting up a coherent whole into a multiplicity of separate parts and then asserting that these individual components are the true and original elements, and he equally refuses the alternative error of merging all specialities in the one composite and uniform mass, and then affirming that combination involves identity. Thus in his community there is room for the infinite varieties of individual human capability and functioning, provided this is developed and exercised within the context of the whole complex organism, for its total welfare and cohesion, and in the full harmony of mutual sympathy and service. What he watches is the twofold risk that particular claims whether to specific duties or to sectional advantage may be pressed to the provoking of strife, or that in the in-

terests of outward conformity genuine insights may be denied or creative adventures resisted. So long as love presumes upon its right to improve its neighbours or in deference to them dares not speak the truth there will be danger of both these failings. Only as love is directed not only to the neighbour but to God and his Christ will it gain its true perspective and proportion, its true recognition both of the rights and of the needs of all other members in the community.

Within the integral energy of the Body of Christ there is room for a wide and flexible versatility of function, for a range of particularities which will constantly delight and enrich these who appreciate them without envy or boredom, and for a creative fusion of talents and discoveries which will constantly renew and inspire the total development of the incorporate life. All will be of God and yet God will work all in all, as each in its due place and proportion shares in the one human-divine adventure.

It may well seem to many Christians that St Paul cannot have ever maintained, let alone maintained in his maturest development and with such passionate conviction, a theology so universal, so integrative and so radiant. That this world, fallen, corrupt, devilish can be the scene of the coming of the Kingdom where God's will is done 'on earth as it is 'm heaven', is surely not only demonstrably utopian but theologically erroneous. Is not St Paul generally regarded by those, who, like the author of 11 Peter find his epistles 'hard to understand' (11 Pet. 3.16), and perhaps have seldom read them, as the man who changed the simplicity and gentleness of Jesus into a dogmatic and institutional system? Is not his authority still quoted to implicate Christians in doctrines of total depravity, in denials of natural religion and of any value to human effort, and in the duty of obedience to all established civil authority from that of Hitler to that of Senator McCarthy -- let alone in acceptance of predestination to

damnation and a literal and final Second Coming? Can it be accurate to describe his development so as to show not only that these ideas explicitly contradict his interpretation of Christianity, but that he progressively but definitely abandoned, corrected and replaced them?

It would need several volumes to prove by chapter and verse how frequently all these errors -- and others -- have been ascribed to the great apostle and to trace the effects which they have had and are still having upon Christendom and the world. Our concern here has been not to discuss at any length such passages as have been taken as the proof of these doctrines, but to set out what any reader studying the text not as infallible oracles, divorced from their context and often mistranslated, but as genuine letters, will see to be their author's plain meaning. He will soon discover that though St Paul was deeply concerned with sin and suffering, he has almost nothing to say about the devil or hell, about the final judgment and everlasting damnation, nothing about creeds or canon law. He is a realist in that he knows and is searchingly honest about the war in our members, the wickedness of mankind, and the difficulty and demands of the Christian way. But he also knows, and always more clearly, the supremacy of God, the power and wisdom of his love, the total sufficiency of his incarnation in Jesus Christ, and the indwelling and available energy of his Holy Spirit. Though men disappoint him -- as he disappoints himself -- he never despairs; and the long list of contrasted and correlated experiences which he sets out in such detail (see specially 2 Cor. 6. 1 - 10; and 11. 16-12. 10) must vindicate him alike from a superficial underestimate of the cost and pain of our service and from a morbid abandonment of confidence and hope.

The fact is that -- hard as we may find it to dissociate St Paul from the complex and manifold entanglements of Paulinism and the innumerable controversies about justification by

faith, faith and works, determinism and free will, the significance of apocalyptic, the relation of the Risen Christ to the Holy Spirit, and of Paul himself to Jesus -- the result if we can succeed in doing so is something at once far simpler, far more relevant, and -- dare it be said? -- far more intelligible. In him we have the clearest and best documented of all the records of the impact which Jesus made on his contemporaries. It comes, and in this respect is unique, from one who has revealed his own character and ability, temperament and interests with a thoroughness that must win the admiration of any psychologist -- revealed himself not at any one moment only but in a series of letters stretching over a number of crowded years and depicting him in a variety of settings and circumstances. The resulting portrait, though it discloses many changes of outlook, due both to increasing self-knowledge and to a remarkable power of response to the lessons of experience, shows a consistent and easily marked growth both in understanding and in concentration.

He is a man faced with a conversion of the sudden and revolutionary type when a strong but unacknowledged conviction is resolutely repressed and concealed by actions directly opposed to it, until at last its validity is suddenly established for him in visible and audible form. Then he must reshape not only his career but -- if he is of Paul's type, one who cannot leave his mind unsatisfied -- his whole philosophy, mentality and centre of interest. We have usually been tempted to suppose that this would involve a speculative examination of possible theories, a course of scholastic enquiries relating to the replacement of the accepted theology and ethics by systems more appropriate to the new outlook. St Paul's mind is practical rather than academic: his interest is in people and their ways, not in problems and their solutions. His centre of interest is how to respond to Christ and find in him a way of life to take the place of the Torah. A man with

great power of concentration, his whole attention after his conversion was centred upon Jesus and as we have seen give rise to a developing, though not at first a wholly orderly process. He brings an educated man's wide range of interests to bear upon the one quest and in the business of his preaching tests out what he afterwards calls the fulness, of Christ. But he is trying to interpret a known person, his Lord; not to create a cultus or a legend or a theology.

This is a matter of importance. There have been many attempts to treat the Apostle as a syncretist and to suggest that his account and estimate of Jesus were formed under the influence of the mystery religions or coloured by borrowings from cults and ideas belonging to the demonologies and theosophies then so widely prevalent. That, as the Athenians noticed, he was ready to pick up current terms whether of the games or of the lecture-hall, and use them to vivify his speeches is clear enough, even if his metaphors are not always very exact, but that he had the sort of creative imagination and originality to present to us a synthetic portrait of his Master is to assign to him qualities which he definitely did not possess. To do so would be out of keeping with his character and could only be accepted if we could prove that he never saw or cared about Jesus until after his conversion, that he had no contact with others who had known him, that we can trace the assimilation of ideas or stories from non-Christian sources, or that his picture is at variance with what we know of Jesus elsewhere and shows signs of internal contradictions. And none of these is consistent with the evidence. The resemblance between the Jesus of the Gospels and the Jesus Christ of St. Paul, both in character and events, is too significantly strong to be accidental. John Mark and Barnabas were his travel companions and he spent many years in the company of Christians. He shows no explicit knowledge of any mystery-cult and his one probable allusion (Gal. 5. 12)

is violently contemptuous. Nor does he refer except in the one quotation from Aratus,1 and another from Menander,2 to any Greek literature or mythology. And we have seen that his growing comprehension of the stature and meaning of Christ is the natural outcome of his own increasing experience and devotion. He calls himself the slave of Christ; and this is a true account. He follows and studies and imitates the great Original. Anyone who reads our brief account of the ministry and impact of Jesus will appreciate how closely St Paul's response to that impact follows those of earlier disciples. Jesus lived on earth the life of the Kingdom: St Paul came to see and describe his vision of what this life might be.

If, for us in these days of opportunity and responsibility when the world-wide community has become a necessity, St Paul's good news seems an unbelievable Utopia, there are surely two things to be said.

We have no right in face of the evidence to argue that this interpretation of life 'in Christ' is not what he said or what he meant. It is not fair to him to fasten upon the eschatology of Thessalonians which he manifestly discarded and which was never more than a secondary and temporary element in his thinking and use this to reject the concept of the one Body and one Spirit by which he replaced it and which is plainly his mature and dominant conviction. Nor must we take his advice about obedience to the powers that be as if thereby we could strip ourselves of all our political and economic responsibilities, forget that today we are Caesar, and subordinate our religion to the exigencies of power- politics or the defence of our standard of living. If we are genuinely constrained to reject the plain teaching of the Lord's Prayer or of St Paul's pictures of love and community,

let us at least admit that this is to renounce Christ. It is to take the essential message of the good news, 'the Kingdom of God is at hand' and either to distort or to disbelieve it. Browning was right when he said 'how very hard it is to be a Christian'. Let us admit if we must that it is too hard: but do not let us deny its nature and accommodate our rendering of it to suit our strategic or material necessities, or our own apocalyptic and theological presuppositions.

Before dismissing it we should at least remember that it has been the inspiration of by far the most significant Christian faith and practice of recent times. The men and women who founded the World's Student Christian Federation, who launched the International Missionary Council at Edinburgh in 1910 and planned the Ecumenical Movement, drew their inspiration from precisely this belief in the universal Christian community. It was in hope and committal, not as is so often suggested today in folly or arrogance, that they took 'the evangelization of the world in this generation' as their goal. With that ideal, and a Christ-centred liberalism as their theology, they worked mightily and at a time in many respects more difficult than our own. Nor must we forget that behind them there was a great succession of teachers, scholars and saints who had found and shared the same sources for their life-work. It was from Ephesians 4 that one of the greatest of them, Frederick Denison Maurice, drew the basis which he submitted to the first Conference of the Co-operative Societies over which he presided in 1854, and from which came one of the chief formative influences of the Labour movement and the social revolution. Maurice, 'a man made for unity', had worked out and made his own the ideal of the Body of Christ in terms of a theology and a social vision directly derived from St Paul and the Gospels. Men either hailed him as a prophet or dismissed him as a dreamer: but his influence upon them was far stronger than in his humility

he ever realized, and has grown steadily with the years. Like St Paul if he was a dreamer at least his dreams came true. Few other men, Christian or not, have a triple achievement so valuable. To have founded the first College for the higher education of women, to have initiated co-operative production and presided over the first Co-operative Conference, and to have been the Principal of the first Working Men's College -- that is evidence of the efficacy of his dream; and if we consider the multitude of social activities created and developed by men and women who drew their inspiration directly from him, to apply to him or them the reproach of Utopianism is palpably absurd.

For St Paul the dreamer is also St Paul the dauntless. Along with his religious insight and gift of interpretation he had also the urge to put his vision into action, the energy to initiate and carry through practical efforts, and something of the strategist's genius for seizing unexpected openings and adapting his resources to their immediate demands. He kept himself fit for any emergency, his plans adjustable and his programme elastic. If the Spirit checked him from going into Asia, he would go into Mysia; if again he was checked from going east into Bithynia, he would go to the coast at Troas and so receive the call into Macedonia. The labours that he undertook and the hardships that he endured gave him his experience and created for him the enlarging perspectives which fostered the growth and scale and proportion of his faith.

His qualities were matched by the circumstances of his period. Those who are happy to trace the providential sequences of history, and who realize that the time and place of the Nativity had a divine appropriateness, will claim that at no other dates could the missionary work of St Paul have been so widely planned or so successfully undertaken. During those years three conditions, important if not altogether

essential for his journeyings, were fulfilled. The world was at peace and well-governed: the seas were freed from pirates and the roads from brigands: travel, especially for a Roman citizen, was easy, and the whole area from Gibraltar to the Euphrates and from the straits of Dover to the Libyan desert and the Upper Nile was open. A single language, the 'commod' Greek of his letters, was the lingua franca of the Mediterranean basin and in the middle of the century had almost superseded Latin: there was little need for divers languages and all the cumbrous business of translations. Finally in every centre of population a Jewish visitor could rely upon finding a settlement of families of his own race and a synagogue in which to meet and address them. We of the English-speaking peoples can appreciate on a world-wide scale the advantages which St Paul was so quick to seize and so skilled in using.

It is an astonishing career this record of the Apostle to the Gentiles whose letters we have been considering. Probably no single individual except his Master has so profoundly influenced the religion and life of Europe or indeed of the world. The Gospel as he interpreted it has supplied the basis for Christian thought and practice ever since and has affected the whole intellectual, moral, legal and political development of civilization. Curiously combined with the great humanist and Stoic tradition of the Graeco-Roman world it has become the public philosophy of mankind; the philosophy which has given the white races the dominating qualities that are now for better or worse infecting all the earth. Christian humanism since the sixteenth century has achieved not only the exploration but the transformation of the globe; and the threatened divorce of the two partners to it is in one form or another responsible for most of our modern ethical and philosophical bewilderment.

Perhaps no clearer example of the greatness of St Paul

can be found than that presented by the brief story in Acts 18 of his appearance before Gallio at Corinth. This first meeting of the two cultures in the person of such eminent representatives is significant and symbolic.

Gallio, proconsul of the province of Achaia, was not only a fine type of the best kind of Roman official. He was the brother of the greatest man of that period in the Roman world, Seneca the statesman and philosopher, the supreme minister of the Emperor and the greatest thinker and writer of his day. Seneca was the first of the imperial Stoics who from his time till the death of Marcus Aurelius gave the empire a century of enlightened government and the world a series of men and writings almost uniquely fulfilling Plato's dream of the philosopher-king.

Gallio himself shared his brother's philosophy, though he lacked his ambition, his self-assertion and his political status. The gentle Gallio seems to have been a man of genuine personal and intellectual excellence, a fine representative, of humanism in the period of its greatest power. If such humanism were capable of providing an inspiration for mankind, if it had a creative and transforming influence, it could have given a soul to the Roman Empire. As it was, it produced Commodus and was the prelude to. a century of tragic disintegration.

The story of St Paul's trial shows the reason. Brought before the proconsul by the Jewish community on the charge of perverting their religion which was legally recognized and approved by Roman law Gallio gave a typical, and from the Stoic standpoint eminently correct, judgment upon him. 'If this were a case of crime or moral depravity, the principle of Reason would make it my duty to deal with it. But if the questions concern religion, words and names and your law, you will see to that for yourselves. I have no intention of acting as judge in such matters' (Acts 18.14-16). So, he

dismissed the case. And even an assault on Sosthenes, a ruler of the synagogue and apparently a disciple of Paul, did not move him to action. According to his philosophy and Roman law the magistrate was not authorized to interfere with religions duly licensed.

But history -- the popular estimate of past crises -- has judged between them. The Apostle of Christ, Gallio's possible victim, has swayed the future. The humanist, by a strange irony, has given his name as typical of superficial flippancy and indifferentism. Though he acted correctly, he ignored the vital issue: religion was (and is) much more important than ethics.

This is, of course, very relevant for us today when Stoicism in the form of Scientific Humanism has made so strong an appeal. Like many of us, the great Stoics of the Roman Empire had broken away from the cosmology of their predecessors, from its stress upon flux, upon the cyclical movement and endless repetitions of time. Seneca in his Quaestiones had tried to work out an idea of progress so as to give a meaning to human effort; but this had hardly affected the general philosophy and ethics of the school. Non-attachment -- or as they more accurately called it immunity to suffering, 'apathy' -- was still the wise man's goal: to face the ruin of the world undismayed, to be ready, as Seneca proved himself to be, to forestall disaster or dishonour by suicide, and in all the changes and chances to preserve his integrity and selfsufficiency. That it has produced or expressed a high type of moral worth, that for those who cannot accept the language and doctrines of institutional religions a modem Stoicism is the favourite alternative, and that Christian ethics is deeply permeated by ideas derived from Seneca and Boethius --- all this will be readily admitted. But this should not disguise the fundamental difference between Gallio and St Paul. Love centred upon God and neighbour accomplishes the release

IX - ST PAUL IN THE EARLY CHURCH

If, as we have seen, the impact of Jesus upon St Paul led to this continuously developing and finally complete interpretation of the good news, one question must be faced. It is an issue vital both for an appreciation of the basic principles of Christian ethics and for the relevance of those principles to the life of Christendom in our own day. Why was it that this 'plain tale' of the significance of Christ as image of the invisible God, and of his universal presence in the totality of the community which is bringing this earth of ours within the fulness of his Body, did not impress itself more immediately upon the Church? We have studied the record of it as it is unfolded in the sequence of the Epistles; and the scrutiny results in a clear and, I believe, a consistent exposition. Yet even from the first it was neglected and where not neglected only partially adopted. 'In the second century', said the great Adolf Harnack, 'only one Christian, Marcion, took the trouble to understand St Paul; but it must be added that he misunderstood him.' 1

It is not as if the Epistles were little known or, in spite of the comment in the admittedly late and unauthentic second letter of St Peter, in any way suspect. They were collected and circulated as early as any documents in the New Testament. They are quoted as authoritative by the beginning of :he second century. The churches associated with them were centres of Christian activity -- Corinth, Antioch, Ephesus, Smyrna. Their leaders were proud of their connection with

1 This famous saying is in his article in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., vol. xvii, p. 692.

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the great Apostle.' From age to age his name has been held in honour, and his Works have been treasured, quoted and studied. Why, then, has his simple message been so little accepted?

The first and most obvious reason is that to accept it involves a revolution in the whole mental outlook. The very fact that his sense of the unity of mankind and indeed of the creative process is so congenial to us, is evidence of the extent to which it was bound to be beyond the comprehension of his contemporaries. They could see perhaps more clearly than we can its religious meaning; for God was more familiar to their thought than to ours; the universe was smaller, cosier, less overwhelming in its age and seeming indifference; the great tradition of Israel supplied a starting-point and a foreshadowing for the good news. But the scale and cosmic significance, and with it much of the quality and teaching, of the Incarnate was obscured by the lack of all that modern knowledge, as applied to organic, psychological and intellectual problems and on the human plane to anthropology and sociology, history and philosophy, has contributed to our way of life. In the first century the environment was unable to sustain the Pauline teaching of the body of the cosmic Christ.

A contributory cause of difficulty arises out of the style and language of the letters themselves. The Apostle's swiftness of mind and changes of subject, his lack of strict order and of precise terminology, and his occasional as contrasted with systematic exposition of the main theme make it difficult even for us to be clear as to the exact content and emphasis of his central message. As the history of Paulinism shows, his work has constantly been explained in terms of matters either subsidiary to his main purpose or superseded by later

For Corinth, see 1 Clem. 47; for Ignatius and Antioch, Eph. 12 etc.; for Smyrna, Polycarp 3.

experience of it. Those who want to find a single unified meaning in his whole correspondence have to face the fact that his interpretation of the good news is not the same in Thessalonians as it is in Romans or in Ephesians and that he constantly uses allusions or metaphors or even arguments which represent particular moods and circumstances and are inappropriate when applied to an objective exposition of his mature evangel.

Along with these difficulties is an obstacle to which less attention has been paid. We are today familiar with the relationship between the Pauline and the Johannine understanding of Jesus -- with Harnack's claim that in the Fourth Gospel we have 'a speaking, acting, Pauline Christ'.' Any full examination of the impact and person of Christ as presented by St John or even any detailed comparison between his and St Paul's general position would be impossible here. But it is notable that the two, while in many respects close enough to support Harnack's dictum, yet differ rather widely in their standpoint and emphasis. They are alike in their stress upon personal relationships, upon love of God in Christ and in him of one another, upon the organic unity of all who live in Christ, and upon the permanence of this union, and also alike in stressing the importance of works, the divine power that enables them, and the gravity of the moral choices which they involve. Both of them write of the eternal Christ and for readers not confined to any race or tradition. Now that we know, from the papyrus fragment found in the Rylands library, that the Fourth Gospel was widely circulated much earlier than had seemed at all likely,2

1 History of Dogma, vol. i, p. 97.
2 This fragment, and the fragments hailed by C. H. Dodd as a New Gospel (cf. Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 1936) and closely linked with St John, prove the wide knowledge of his Gospel in the first half of the second century.

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we may assume that the two documents the Gospel and the collected Epistles were available at the same period.

They were similar, but the Gospel was at once more universally read, more directly impressive and more congenial in outlook. Its prologue with the epoch-making use of the term Logos gave the key to the first and greatest school of Christian apologetics and theology. Its language -- light, life, love, the truth and the way -- was familiar to all Hellenistic students. Its interpretation of the Synoptists caused it to be recognized at once as the spiritual gospel. The Church's leaders, and educated Christians generally, fastened upon it as the perfect picture of the divine Saviour.

The differences between it and St Paul thus became an obstacle to the full acceptance of the Pauline ideal. St John is by comparison at once more intimate and more individualist. He gives substance and concrete presentation to the praises of agapé and to its transforming alchemy. 'So God loved the world' is his interpretation of Christ; 'the disciple whom Jesus loved' his explanation of his own devotion: 'if ye love me' his condition of moral excellence. We surely know that for our own day, whatever difficulties scholars may feel about the authorship and historicity of the gospel, its quality touches the hearts and commends the faith as no other can do. We as Christians have been living in the Johannine age.

But when this is said, there it another side to the story. We cannot but miss the stress upon community and the body of Christ. Even in the excellence of the image of the vine and its branches his concern is not with the growth and health of the whole but with the fruitfulness or sterility of its particular members. There is not the Pauline insistence on the integration of the community and its cooperative character, or the sense that the true life of man is much more than our own individual fulfilment. The interdependence of mankind in Christ, and the destined universality of his Body, is no-

where stressed, is indeed hardly compatible with the Johannine picture. The light lightens every man, but each can choose darkness; this is perhaps the limit of his vision. Over against Christ stand the Jews -- and they are always and only the adversary. With them is the world to which Jesus does not mean to reveal himself -- and the treatment of it is scornful and even unattractive.1 If 'salvation is of the Jews', they have with few exceptions rejected it: 'You are of your father the devil' (John 8.44). There is here the spirit of Boanerges, eager to call down fire and consume (Mark 3.17; Luke 9.55).

This element in the Fourth Gospel would not have been sufficient to counteract the influence of St Paul if its author had not been made responsible by an increasing tradition in the early Church for the Revelation of St John the Divine, and so for a large share in the development of the eschatology of the Day of Wrath and the torture-chambers of the Inferno. It is something of an irony that a Gospel which contains almost nothing of crude apocalyptic should have been associated with a book wholly dedicated to it --especially as the language and style of the two is as widely contrasted as their contents. But in the vast accretion of pagan elements which built up the vision of hell St John's name was inevitably included; and the earlier vision of the universal brotherhood of the Christian community was overwhelmed by it. A world which ended with the Last Judgment, as depicted in the frescoes and hymns of Catholic and Orthodox Christendom, was a world which could only accept the vision of Romans 11 or Ephesians 4 as applying to an institutionalized and exclusive elect. The great deterrent must be preserved, even at the cost of defaming the character of God, denying the fulness of the revelation in Jesus Christ and confining the fellowship of the Holy Spirit to the baptized.

As F. C. Burkitt ventured to say: cf. The Gospel History and its Transmission, pp. 227-9.

It was, however, the activity of Marcion, his most enthusiastic follower, that explains most clearly the neglect of St Paul in the early centuries.1 The Tübingen school, those pioneers of New Testament criticism, have made us familiar with their theory of the primary importance of the controversy between Jews and Gentiles in the early Church, and have used the contrast between Galatians and the Epistle of St James as the clue to the whole interpretation of St Paul and indeed of Christian origins. We can see on what slender evidence that exaggeration was based, and how it distorts the Apostle's thought and influence. But Marcion did in fact create the breach which they ascribed to St Paul himself. St Paul, while denying the plenary authority of the Law, never dreamt of rejecting the Old Testament, or the manhood of Jesus, or the picture of him in the Gospels. Marcion assigned the Old Testament to a demiurge or inferior deity, treated Jesus as a purely spiritual being, denied his birth and death, and refused all the records of him except an expurgated version of St Luke's Gospel and ten of the Epistles of St Paul (which he may well have been the first to collect into a single volume); and from this material he proclaimed a Gnostic and ascetic institution, separated from the Church and furnished with its own rule of life and ministry. The Marcionite sect was in fact large and respected by the end of the second century, and as it claimed to base itself wholly upon St Paul's teaching and work, it prejudiced the orthodox against his influence. A study of the quotations from the New Testament in patristic literature will show that apart from many references to his teaching on civil obedience, marriage and the Second Coming and a few texts bearing upon disciplinary and doctrinal controversy, there is hardly any con

cern with him, and that his insistence upon love, community and fulfilment has been forgotten. Unhappily, even when the Reformers restored him to a central position, they concentrated almost entirely upon a distorted version of his emphasis upon faith, and accepted as a divine ordinance his statement that the powers that be are ordained of God.

Few illustrations of this failure to appreciate or maintain the Pauline vision are so striking as that which has been fully stated by John Oman in his great book Grace and Personality, and more recently investigated in detail by Dr T. F. Torrance in The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers. To St Paul, as we have seen, the word charis was specifically applied to the gracious act of God's love which gave us Jesus Christ, reconciled us to himself through faith in Christ, and integrated us by his Spirit into the gracious fellowship of Christ's body. Always the word describes not some quality or possession which can be bestowed and handed on but a vital and personal relationship, as our love responds to and is quickened by the love revealed in Christ. Oman had showed how this personal relationship had been replaced by doctrines in which grace has become something which can be communicated by ceremonial acts and can operate as a medicine of the soul, a food of immortality, a talent conferred upon the elect. And Dr Torrance, examining the writings of the age following on St Paul, shows the steps by which this degradation actually took place. It is very significant to find so profound a change of quality taking place so soon. It explains why the fulness of St Paul's vision should have to wait for its realization until world-unity had become a necessity for mankind.

X - Epilogue

COMING OF AGE

THAT the community brought to birth by the ministry and travail of Jesus on the day of Pentecost and proclaimed in its true stature and significance by his Apostle in the series of his letters, should so evidently supply the new model for which in this nuclear age we are surely equipped and aspiring, will seem on the face of it to the critic familiar with the many vagaries of church history either a fantastic coincidence or the result of ingenious special pleading. That an age like our own, so manifestly new and unprecedented in its whole outlook, should find as the answer to its questions the rediscovery of the Fellowship of the Holy Spirit, that embodiment of the person of Jesus in terms of the two untranslatables, agapé and koinonia, of the first Christian century -- this is the sort of confirmation of the faith which seems too good to be true.

Nevertheless that at the heart of the revelation which had turned the world upside down, in the earliest records of Jesus and the writings of his Apostle, we should find precisely this evidence of a new type of organic society, characterized by its love of God and of the brethren and constituting a way of life for which the world could discover no precedents -- this was surely what we must have expected. 'See how these Christians love one another!' was the testimony wrung from their persecutors by the martyrs in the arena. And because of it the Way was winning adherents in the imperial household before, it was a century old. History.

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even the traditionalized history established by Eusebius and his successors in the fourth century, gave us a picture of the manycoloured variety of form taken by the early Church, of the continuous and bewildered attempts of the Empire to eliminate its influence and destroy the sources of its power, and of the stages by which their confession of the victory of Jesus proclaimed the surrender of its adversaries. When with the conversion of Constantine the fiercest of the persecutions proved the Church invincible, Christianity had already demonstrated its possession of a unity which Rome had never succeeded in establishing, a theology which preserved the framework of the Hebrew and Greek and Latin inheritance, a liturgy which enshrined and sacramentalized the worship and ethos of the community, and a vitality at once manysided in its adaptability and unbreakable in its inner strength. Alone of all the possessions of Europe the Christian community has survived the break-down of a civilization, and from Byzantium to Iona has kept the ancient lights burning.

It is a strange, and on a first view often a tragic and terrible, story. The contrast between the spontaneity and simplicity of the first century and the sycophancy, ambitions and intrigues of the fourth give an impression of almost universal degeneracy: the Church had gained the world but had surely lost its own soul. The factions against which St Paul had specially warned his Greek converts had within a century and a half after Nicea destroyed the most ancient of the eastern patriarchates, split the Greek-speaking churches into schisms and opened the way for Islam. The condemnation of Origen, the greatest scholar and theologian of Christendom, and the canonization of Cyril of Alexandria alike illustrate the moral degradation of the Church's standards. The traffic in relics and hagiologies, in pilgrimages and shrines, in fables and folklore replaced the two commandments of the Gospel by a meticulous apparatus of kalendars, offices, legends,

superstitions and emblems which repeated and surpassed all that the Apostle and his Master had denounced. As, such the Church survived the dark ages.

And behind the transformation of the blessed community into an ecclesiastical and dogmatic institution was a radical change in the whole concept of the relation between God and the world. The integration of the natural and the supernatural, of which the Word made flesh had been the symbol and instrument, was abandoned not through any conscious rebellion but by reason of the Christian's obligation towards meeting the needs of the age, The pagan world was a bored world; Rome had lost, if it had ever possessed, a sense of wholesome wonder: from the orgies of its banquets to the bloodbaths in its arenas it liked its pleasures crude: it had no eye for nature and no delight in common things: it was agog for the supernatural. The Church was tempted to meet the demand. Miraclemongering was effective and rewarded; and very soon lists of miracles became the necessary proofs of the sanctity and value of the Gospel. Jesus had discounted such signs: his followers multiplied them; and as we can see already in St Matthew's Gospel, and more obviously in the apocryphal writings that won such vogue in the second century, there was a swift increase in the range and importance attached to them. When Pope Leo 1 in his famous Tome contrasted the two natures in Christ, it was the godhead which was ablaze with portents, the manhood which succumbed to injuries which is a significant example of the great Pope's theology. The natural order on whose worth Jesus had based his lessons was degraded and vilified, until for St Augustine in his final phase it became a massa perditionis.

Moreover if the world was blasé it was also debauched. The Satyricon of Petronius may or may not be the filthiest book ever written: at least the circles entertained by it were

septic with snobbery and vice. It is among the splendours of Christendom that they brought a clean fragrance into human intimacies and that sages like Clement of Alexandria were not ashamed to write about organs and their functioning 'which God had not been ashamed to make'. But in doing so they were not always immunized; and among them there are some like Tertullian whose purity is as morbid as sin, and for whom sex itself is on the road to becoming lascivious. The tainted asceticism and fantastic praises of virginity, which disfigure the writings of St Jerome, are evidence of the corruption of nature at its most creative, and of the consequences against which St Paul warned his readers when parenthood is debased. They led directly to the separation of the 'religious' from the 'lay' world.

So too even the hostility of the world, heroically though it was endured, left its stains upon the life and thought of the Church. The records of the martyrs are splendid testimony to the fortitude and the faith of the men and women given to the lions or subjected to the infamies and torments of their persecutors. But, as we can see, the effect upon those who watched their agony was distorting. When Tertullian wrote the last chapter of the De Spectaculig he gave to his fellow Christians the vision of hell and let loose the vindictiveness which has represented the eternal torments of the damned as' an essential element in the beatitude of the redeemed. That the Church became obsessed with the Devil and righteousness was sought mainly as an insurance against damnation is a tragic comment upon Christ's mission to seek and save that which is being lost. And the dualism which it fostered has at times gone near to banishing God from his own world.

This segregation of nature from grace, of the secular from the sacred, of the State from the Church, has dominated the western world ever since the fourth century. For a time a

strict apartheid was resisted. The power of the Roman empire was assumed by the papacy; education and therefore statecraft passed into ecclesiastical hands; a nominal theocracy was once or twice almost attained. But as the barbarian invasions led towards the age of feudalism the laity began to assert their claim to a measure of selfgovernment; and events like the journey to Canossa 1 could not secure for the religious more than a titular supremacy. In fact there were for the whole of the middle ages two orders with two codes of morality, two systems of law, two ways of life; and neither the scholars like St Thomas nor the evangelists like St Francis could effectively or permanently re-establish the unity of the Body of Christ. In the thirteenth century there was a wonderful manifestation of apostolic adventure, a brilliant illustration of what Christian unity and integrity could accomplish. It produced the Summa and the Divina Commedia; it built Chartres; it was the flowering period of western mediaevalism.

Yet on its deeper side the understanding of nature, the ordering of society and the moral qualities of the community all showed how Christendom had failed to realize the wholeness and harmony, the fellowship and integration of God's world. The work of St Albert, in some respects at least a good student of plants and animals, and of the Franciscans Grosseteste and Roger Bacon in mathematics and the elements of physics and chemistry, had emphasized and employed a truly scientific method of observation and experiment. But their influence even on their contemporaries was neither large nor lasting. The age of fable and emblem, of magic and superstition continued unchallenged. Particular gilds reached a high level of technical skill, but there was no sharing of knowledge and no attempt to frame a coherent interpretation of the natural order. And in any case such matters were

1 The Emperor accepted public humiliation by the Pope (1077).

concerned only with the secular world, and had therefore no serious contribution to make to the world of religion and to the eternal destiny of mankind. This other world possessed and enforced the learning which dominated education, directed policies, and demanded abedience. The thirteenth century might foreshadow the growth of powers which would challenge and eventually reform the institutional Church. Here as elsewhere, the revolution might have come from within. But the hierarchy championed the rigidity of the doctrinal and institutional structure that supported it and was too strong to be transformed without violence. The schism of the Church under two Popes in the fourteenth century weakened it; the corruption of the Papacy in the fifteenth discredited it, and abuses multiplied; the Renaissance challenged its theology, the new nationalism its autocracy; Wyclif and Huss indicated possible alternatives; the Church in spite of movements for reform ignored the danger: a rupture became inescapable.

Unfortunately it came on too narrow an issue. In its reaction against ecclesiastical formalism and tyranny it rejected the brotherhood and solidarity which Catholicism even at its most corrupt had preserved and proclaimed. Individual Reformers recovered and expressed a deep personal devotion to Christ, and a discipline of prayer and study, obedience and fortitude. But the Kingdom of God was for thein essentially an inward, almost a private, possession, a blessedness which freed them from sin, assured them of salvation, and included the secular as well as the spiritual side of life. To be within it involved a concern for evangelism, but not in any large degree, a sense of community, still less of universal fellowship. The State, though under God, was an order basically different from the Church and to be sustained and served by methods to which the law of love did not necessarily apply. Though the Reformers gave importance to the laity and

in fact greatly stimulated scientific, economic and industrial activities, there was little attempt to integrate these with the specifically religious duties or to admit that the life of faith had anything to do with the conduct of worldly affairs. Though a few leaders like Melanchthon or Zwingli were in the tradition of Erasmus and the humanists, the bulk of the early Reformers in their zeal for the Bible as the only 'religion of Protestants' regarded secular studies as irrelevant, and with the coming of Calvinism condemned them as the wisdom of this world and doomed to destruction. Devoted as they were to the study of St Paul and employing the Epistle to the Romans as typical of the ancient learning which Catholicism had depraved, they did not fully appreciate his philosophy of history or his vision of the Body of Christ with its triple characteristics of love and community and moral insight.

At its best, their achievement is to be judged by the immense increase that it brought to the freedom and integration of the individual believer, to the varied and adventurous life that it generated, and to the democratic principles and scientific achievements that found their inspiration in it. Men like Conrad Gesner in the sixteenth century or John Ray in the seventeenth mark a new age alike in the range of their interests, the excellence of their work, the generosity of their characters, and the sincerity of their religion. The scientists of whom they were typical, freed from the persecution which had imprisoned Roger Bacon, burnt Bruno and silenced Galileo, and encouraged as they were in Britain by Christian scholars and thinkers, produced a wholly new attitude towards nature and commenced the long and brilliant series of discoveries which have not only transformed our standards of living but have given us a unified, verifiable and now almost complete understanding of the physical universe, an increasing knowledge of the coherence and the interpretation of the totality of our experience, and a control of resources

which if rightly directed could make St Paul's dream of a world united and consummated in Christ come true.

The sort of influences which produced deterioration in the earliest Church could of course be paralleled from any period of Christian history down to our own. They arise in the process of growth. A community lives necessarily in an environment which it has not (at least as yet) at any time learnt completely to control. It may, indeed must, if it has any serious characteristics or convictions, either challenge its uncontrolled surroundings or adapt itself to them without recognition of their incompatibility and in the interest not of its true nature but of its comfort or its survival. Life as we trace it from the beginning of its organic activity has been a question of such adaptation; the new element for us is that with the coming of man -- and indeed to some degree before

that event -- the choice and consciousness of the individual began to influence the course of progress. Now, as we are all aware, cultural and intellectual control is playing a more important part in evolution than physical or genetic factors; man, if not master of his fate, is at last able either to destroy life or to bring it to wholly unprecedented levels of attainment.

In consequence this business of adaptation to environment can be analysed, mapped out, planned and deliberately ordered to a degree unthinkable even a generation ago. We ought to be in a position, as we learn what are the conditions of the good life, to bring enormously increased powers of understanding and of action to the adjustment of means to ends and the fulfilment of human welfare.

This does not of course mean that the problem -- for us in this book the basic problem -- of the two moralities, our duty to God and to society, has been solved, or, even in its present shape, is near to solution. It may still be true, as Lord Lindsay contends, that the contrast between what at our best we know and would do and what in fact can be done without social disaster can never be wholly removed -- that as many of us have long affirmed our human life is inevitably the quest of a horizon: 'we cannot comprehend God'. But it remains true that most of the obstacles which to Lindsay seemed immovable could now be surmounted. With the recent changes in the meaning for us of space and time, with the release of almost unlimited power, and with the emergence of a new sense of the wholeness of life, and of the understanding of our world, and of the nature and capacities of mankind, we can at least see the necessity of a united effort to meet this new situation, and catch a glimpse of what such effort involves.

Nor need we be dismayed by the evidence of history, even if to some of our contemporaries this seems to deserve Olive

Schreiner's comment, 'a striving and a striving and an ending in nothing'. As we look back and not only see the innumerable failures of particular religious adventures, but observe how often these are due not to: human wickedness so much as to the exaggeration of special trends arising from good motives and aimed at laudable objectives, we are tempted to warn our fellows not to expect too much, and even to condemn as utopian anything that savours of faith, hope or charity. Such pessimism, or realism as its champions call it, may, in times of depression like the recent thirties and forties, replace those virtues by fear, despair and hate -- much antiCommunist Christian literature deserves such condemnation. But in spite of it history demonstrates that in fact Christ thus crucified afresh is not yet or by such means defeated; that good, and more abundant good, does arise out of, failure; and that if we could accept it such resurrections have been and can be both sudden and triumphant.1

Christianity is, after all, the only element in our Western world to survive the downfall of civilizations; and it may even be said about all religions that they shine most brightly in the darkness. If the Jews of today do not stand by the graves of Hitler and his agents as they have done by those of so many former persecutors, it is because these graves are to a unique degree unknown and unhonoured. The quality of survival value which a scientific age accounts pre-eminent surely belongs to the great religious teachers and traditions of mankind more obviously than to any other factor in human experience.

Similarly we must not be depressed because the resurrection of religion cannot be expected to, come suddenly or with speed. We are so used to accepting the traditional account of evolution as a haphazard process needing millions of years

1 Olive Schreiner's words are surely not even fair as a summary of her own Story of an African Farm.

for its development that we have lost the power to believe that anything, except disaster, can happen in the twinkling of an eye. We see how mistakes made at a period of crisis take centuries for the working out of their full consequences; and we forget that at the point of decision the actual event which fired the train was often immediate and unexpected. It is indeed the permanent value of apocalyptic that it concentrates upon and emphasizes the suddenness and explosive character of the catastrophic; that what lawyers have called an act of God is as swift and unpredictable as the lightning, and that conversion and the transformation that it involves take place almost instantaneously. Put otherwise: opportunity is in general given to us once and for all: unlike nature, when we reject it, it does not recur again in the same form.

Such moments of decision are perhaps specially familiar in the spiritual life; and not only for the individual. One of the most obvious of them came upon the Anglican Communion at the Lambeth Conference in 1920, when the whole assembly, in spite of its deep and notorious divisions, was swept into the experience of vision and unity which found expression in the issue of its Appeal to Christendom. There followed a short period of quite intense expectation; and three leaders of the chief parties in the Church issued a volume of strong commendation and resolve. Nothing was done. In a few months the old arguments had destroyed the ,peace of God'. Before a year had passed the authors of the Appeal were explaining away their acceptance of it. Did they remember that exactly the same thing had happened though more slowly after the most famous of all Church Councils, when the Fathers of Nicea with only a few exceptions began to apologize for their verdict and to give the Arian heresy a new and more extensive popularity?

So the drama of the ministry of Jesus repeats itself --- life abundant, life laid down, life arisen, life eternal. We are pre-

pared for our crisis; it comes and we make our decision; and the result awaits us. We fail; and the whole venture seems frustrate and finished, 'a striving and a striving and an ending in nothing'; if we are honest, it seems better that we had never been born. That is too often, and perhaps never more evidently than today, the verdict that each of us must give.

It is a mistaken verdict. We fail in our plain obligation; we have not been worthy of our opportunity; we have mistaken its character, missed our mark, betrayed our trust. For what our contribution might have been worth we have 'let down the side'. So, to relate the trivial to the supreme, the disciples forsook their Master and Judas sent him to his Cross. The pattern is woven into the stuff and substance of our world, individual and corporate and from top to bottom of the spiral of its life.

There are times when the tragedy of it overwhelms us, when we are, and deserve to be, broken-hearted by our guilt and the shame of our self-exposure; times too when the slowness of its movement dismays us, and we are convinced that in fact all progress is illusory; and times when, if somehow the end is attained, our own failure or less than failure is irrelevant. But there are also moments when the triumph of its Easter despite our betrayal fills us with wonder and an almost unselfish joy, when we catch a glimpse of the contribution which these transiencies have in fact made to the forward movement of God's purpose, and when his power to bring good out of evil discloses to us its significance. The evil has been done: that remains plain, and we cannot ignore or excuse it. Yet through no merit of ours it has been taken up into the whole meaning of life, and worked out in the total of its suffering, and made the occasion for its future travail. So the Apostle has declared; and so, like the rest of the creation, we can live in hope. For our frustration is the

price of our freedom, and our quest the glorious liberty of the family of God.

In the working out of the pattern its development can be traced in the macrocosm as well as in the periodic episodes and individual lives which represent it. On the grand scale the epochs of Christian history conform to the same design, as the spiral of their progress enters upon its successive phases. We are plainly at one of these few and long-spaced turning-points; and scientists and historians agree that it represents a coming of age for mankind. We are now aware that after long spells of childhood and adolescence we have reached the time at which we enter upon the control of our destiny with an understanding and a mastery of its processes such as no previous generations have possessed. Humanity is coming of age; and its primary task is to realize the extent and the conditions of its responsibility. At such a crisis the revelation which is the basis of Christian ethics must be studied and appreciated and accepted afresh.

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FIRST PUBLISHED 1961
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