DIVISION V. § i. CHAPTER XII. 1-2.
Self-surrender in response to God.
And first of all the general attitude of mind is defined, which it befits us to adopt towards God as He has now revealed Himself to us. It is the response of entire self-surrender—the response of sacrifice to sacrifice. St. Paul 'beseeches,' or rather 'encourages,' or 'summons' the Roman Christians, using for his motive power[[1]] all the rich store of divine compassions which he has just been occupied in disclosing or explaining to them, to make the only response really possible to such an exhibition of divine love; and that is to present themselves in sacrifice to God. What God asks is not dead victims but living men, in body as well as spirit consecrated to His service and rendered acceptable in His sight: and this sort of self-oblation, on the pattern of Christ, is the only reasonable sort of divine service for man to offer. The transitory world, to which such an ideal is quite alien, is indeed all around them, but they are not to suffer themselves to be assimilated to its fleeting fashion. Their whole point of view is changed and become new; and this must result in so thorough a transformation of their old worldly ways of thinking that a new inward light will shine in their hearts, and they will be able to discriminate and see what God's will is, and so to follow the way of perfection.
I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. And be not fashioned according to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
This short paragraph is full of meaning, and is profoundly characteristic of St. Paul in thought and language.
The 'therefore' is one of the great transitional 'therefores[[2]]' by which St. Paul shows his constant sense of the inter-connexion of doctrine and life: the doctrine passing by a clear logic into the practical life, and the life drawing all its practical motives from the realities disclosed in the doctrine. It is truly nothing whatever but shallowness and 'shortness of thought' which can suffer us to imagine that the Christian character—I do not say all morality, but the Christian character—could long survive the Christian creed.
And the character of this summary exhortation shows us that any idea of a faith which stops short of moral identification with its object is utterly alien to St. Paul's mind. Faith is no true Christian faith, if it is content to receive from the Father, or from Christ, a gift which leaves it still outside the life of God. The faith which Christ inspires asks for and receives nothing less than real fellowship in His divine and human life, and that life is, in its joys as well as its sorrows, a life of self-surrender, of sacrifice. Thus the Christian only welcomes the gift of pardon through Christ's sacrifice in order to be admitted into the freedom of the dedicated life in Christ, which is the life of sacrifice. It is the sort of sacrifice (as St. Paul's language indicates) which is as different as possible from any such asceticism as is prompted by contempt of the flesh or the body, or refusal of joy, or love of death. It is sacrifice which seeks to cultivate into full vitality every faculty of body as well as of mind (and that in an active society or brotherhood), in order to consecrate all we are or can be to the service of God, and so realize in conscious correspondence with the divine will the rational worship for humanity.
St. Paul's words here about a 'living' as opposed to a bloody, and a 'rational' as opposed to an animal sacrifice, may be the basis on which the eucharist, the Christian worship 'in spirit and in truth,' was often called in early times the 'reasonable' and 'bloodless sacrifice[[3]].' And whether this be the case or no, at any rate we must relearn the lesson that St. Augustine is for ever insisting upon, that the eucharistic sacrifice essentially involves and implies the offering of the Church as the body of Christ, that is, the offering of ourselves as members of the body; and we may feel profoundly thankful that, in our service of Holy Communion, this truth has been restored to its proper prominence, after having been, in the pre-Reformation service, almost ignored. 'And here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and lively sacrifice unto thee.' In this prayer is really the climax of our sacrificial worship[[4]].
The true service of God is intelligent correspondence with the divine will—this is perfection; and to correspond with the divine will we must be able to know it: and this is what we can do if we are true to the principle of our new birth, and suffer it radically and permanently to transform us and our point of view (for nothing less than this is carried by St. Paul's expression rendered 'transform'). Negatively, this means that we must maintain our separateness from the worldly world, to which we died at our baptism—the world of human society as it devotes itself to its business and its pleasures, leaving God out of account[[5]]. For if the worldly world is suffered to fashion us in accordance with its shallow and transitory show (this is the idea conveyed by the word rendered 'fashion'), we shall be blinded to what our regeneration ought to have made plain to us.
[[1]] For the use of 'by,' cf. xv. 30; 1 Cor. i. 10 ('through' is the same word); 2 Cor. x. 1.
[[2]] See further, Ephes. pp. 172 ff.
[[3]] It is more likely, however, that the phrases 'rational worship' and 'bloodless sacrifice' had an earlier Jewish origin. They occur in The Testament of the XII Patriarchs, which is apparently a Jewish document christianized. There the angels are said (Levi. 3) to 'offer to the Lord a rational odour of sweet savour and a bloodless offering.' Philo also, as Mr. Conybeare points out to me, in several passages describes the true sacrifices as 'bloodless': and by bloodless sacrifices he means either the meal offerings as opposed to the animal sacrifices (De Anim. Sacrif. ed. Mangey ii. 250), or truly spiritual acts as opposed to merely outward (De Ebreitate, i. p. 370, cf. ii. 254). These two ideas run easily into one another, and the earliest uses of the expression 'bloodless sacrifice' for the eucharist have a similar ambiguity.
[[4]] See further, p. [179]. I may be allowed to express the earnest desire that we might have liberty in our Church to read both of the Post-Communion Prayers, which seem supplementary rather than alternative to one another.
[[5]] See Ephes. p. 92.