(1) The idea of the chosen people all through the Old Testament is that they are as a whole consecrated to God. Priests and kings appointed by God to their several offices may indeed fulfil special functions in the national life, yet the fundamental idea is never lost that the entire nation is holy, 'a kingdom of priests.' It is because this is true that the prophets can appeal as they do to the people in general, as well as to priests and rulers, as sharing altogether the responsibility of the national life. Now the whole of this idea is transferred, only deepened and intensified, to the Christian Church. That too has its divinely-ordained ministers, its differentiation of functions in the one body, but the whole body is priestly, and all are citizens—not merely residents but citizens, that is, intelligent participators in a common corporate life consecrated to God. How truly realized this idea was in the early Christian communities, St. Paul's letters are our best witnesses. They are really—except the pastoral epistles—letters to the churches and not to the clergy. It is the whole body which is at Thessalonica and Corinth to concern itself with the exercise of moral discipline[[4]]—the whole body in the Galatian churches and at Colossae who are to concern themselves with the apprehension and protection of the full Christian truth. They are all to be 'perfectly initiated' in Christ Jesus, full participators in the affairs of the divine society[[5]]. Whatever needs to be said afterwards about the special functions of special officers, this is the first thing to be said and recognized; and it gives us a profound sense of the distance we have fallen from our ideal. The laity, it is generally understood among us, are to come to church and perhaps to communion, are to accept the ministries of religion at marriages and funerals, and are to subscribe a little money to religious objects; but they may leave it to the clergy, as a matter of course, to carry on the business of religion—that is, worship and doctrine, for discipline has been dropped out—and confine themselves to a certain amount of irresponsible criticism of the sermons of the clergy and their proceedings generally.
The catholic church
For this state of things—this very false sacerdotalism—the responsibility is generally laid at the door of 'clerical arrogance.' It is not necessary to consider how large a factor in the result clerical arrogance has really been, for certainly what alone has given the clergy the opportunity to put themselves in false isolation, and what has been an immensely more powerful factor in the general result, has been the spiritual apathy of the mass of church members, an apathy which began as soon as the Christian profession began to cost men little or nothing.
Are we to set to work to revive St. Paul's ideal of the life of a Church? If so, what we need is not more Christians, but better Christians. We want to make the moral meaning of church membership understood and its conditions appreciated. We want to make men understand that it costs something to be a Christian; that to be a Christian, that is a Churchman, is to be an intelligent participator in a corporate life consecrated to God, and to concern oneself therefore, as a matter of course, in all that touches the corporate life—its external as well as its spiritual conditions. For the houses people live in, their wages, their social and commercial relations to one another, their amusements, the education they receive, the literature they read, these, no less truly than religious forces strictly so called, affect intimately the health and well-being of any society of men. We Christians are fellow-citizens together in the commonwealth that is consecrated to God, a commonwealth of mortal men with bodies as well as souls.
(2) But St. Paul also describes the Church as the 'household of God.' When our Lord was speaking to St. Peter about the ministry which was being entrusted to the apostles, He said to him, 'Who then is the faithful and wise steward whom his Lord shall set over his household to give them their portion of food in due season[[6]]?' This description opens to us part of the meaning of the divine household. A household is a place where a family is provided for, where there is a regular and orderly supply of ordinary needs. And the Church is the divine household in which God has provided stewards to make regular spiritual provision for men, so that they shall feel and know themselves members of a family, understood, sympathized with, helped, encouraged, disciplined, fed. What in fact are the sacraments and sacramental rites, what are baptism, confirmation and communion, marriage and ordination, the administration of the word of God, the dealings with the penitent, the sick, the dead, but the 'portions of food in due season,' the orderly distribution of the bread of life in the family or household of God?
But there is another idea which, in St. Paul's mind, attaches itself strongly to the idea of the 'divine family.' It is that in this household we are sons and not servants—that is intelligent co-operators with God, and not merely submissive slaves. It is noticeable how often he speaks with horror of Christians allowing themselves again to be 'subject to ordinances,' or to 'the weak and beggarly rudiments,' the alphabet of that earlier education when even children are treated as slaves under mere obedience. 'Ye observe days, and months, and seasons, and years, I am afraid of you[[7]].' 'Why do ye subject yourselves to ordinances, handle not, taste not, touch not[[8]].' It is perfectly true to say that what St. Paul is deprecating is a return to Jewish or pagan observances. But this is not all. He demands not a change of observance only, but a change of spirit. Their attitude towards observances as such is to be different. Not that St. Paul does not insist on that readiness to obey reasonable authority which is a condition of corporate life, or would hesitate to lay stress upon corporate religious acts in the Christian body. The truth is very far from that. 'We have no such custom, neither the churches of God,' is an argument which ought to be sufficient to suppress eccentricity. To 'keep the traditions' is a mark of a good Christian[[9]]. 'A man that is heretical' (or rather 'factious') after the first and second admonition is to be 'refused'[[10]]. Government is to be a constant element in the Christian life. But the character of authority and of obedience is to be changed. The authority is to be reasonable authority, and the obedience intelligent obedience. Passive obedience to an authority which does not explain itself, whether in a spiritual director or in the Church as a whole, St. Paul would have thought of meanly as a Christian virtue. And the multiplication of authoritative observances he would have dreaded as a bondage. Our Lord was very unwilling to give His disciples, when He was on earth, much direction. And St. Paul is true to his Master's spirit. Our life should be ordered by principles, rather than directed in detail. For to rely upon direction from outside dwarfs our sense of personal responsibility, and personal relationship to the divine Spirit. A certain amount of confusion, hesitation, difference, due to men feeling their way, due to their different individualities having free scope, St. Paul would apparently have thought preferable to that sort of order which is the product of a very strong and exacting external government, and to an undue exaltation of the virtue of passive obedience.
(3) St. Paul describes the Church as a sanctuary which is gradually to be built for God to dwell in. We remember how our Lord had said of the temple at Jerusalem, 'Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.' 'He spake,' St. John explains, 'of the temple of his body[[11]].' That—His own humanity proved triumphant over death—was to be henceforth the tabernacle of God's presence among men. Where that is God is, and the true worship of the Father in spirit and in truth. But that body, raised again the third day and become 'quickening Spirit' as the body of the risen Christ, takes within its influence the whole circle of believers. The 'body of Christ,' which is God's temple, comes to mean the Church which lives in Christ's life, and worships in Christ's Spirit. This is still the Church of the fathers of the old covenant, but fundamentally reconstituted. God, as St. James perceived[[12]], was fulfilling His promise to 'build again the tabernacle of David which had fallen.' It was being built anew upon the apostles and their companions the prophets, the immediate ambassadors of Christ, as foundation-stones of the renewed building, who themselves have their positions determined and secured by Christ Jesus as chief corner-stone. It was a spiritual fabric combining, like a Gothic cathedral, various parts or 'several buildings,' with their distinctive characteristics, all however united in one construction, one great sanctuary of a redeemed humanity in which God dwells.
The metaphor suggests the combination of national and individual differences in real unity. It encourages us to pay due regard to the free developement of our own characters and capacities, but also to develope ourselves as parts of a greater whole, always remembering that the work of a Christian individual or a local church is in God's sight measured, not by its isolated result, but by the contribution it makes to the life of the whole body. An eccentric individuality, a schismatic developement is, even in proportion to its strength, a source of weakness to the whole. By its relation to the whole life of the Church all Christian effort must be both invigorated and restrained.
The metaphor suggests further that the social organization of the Church is an organization for worship. It is a house and a citizenship, because it is also a sanctuary. The strength of corporate Christianity is to be measured by the vitality of corporate worship. A church life in which the eucharist is not the centre, for all the vigour which it may show in learning, or preaching, or philanthropy, is after all but a maimed life.
(4) But the Church, as a visible organization of men, can be what it is—the city of God, His household and His sanctuary—only because it is pervaded by Christ's life and spirit. The 'stones of the building' are not merely placed side by side of one another, or held together by any external agency of government; they are as branches of a living tree, limbs of a living body. In this recurrent thought, which will be presented to us in another form when St. Paul comes to speak of the head and the body, is the interpretation of all his theory of the Church. It is verily and indeed the extension of the life of Christ.