St. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians: A Practical Exposition

by Charles Gore

But to think of his special office as apostle of a catholic society, is to think also of its extraordinary difficulty.

The difficulty of catholicity

When we set ourselves in our own later age to rehabilitate the sense of church membership, we feel at once the strength of the forces against us; we realize how much the feeling of blood-kinship in the family counts for, or the wider kinship of national life, or the common interests of our professions or our classes, compared to the feeble sense of fellowship which comes from a church membership which is so largely conventional. Most assuredly we feel the difficulty of what we have in hand. But we cannot feel it more intensely than St. Paul felt the difficulty involved in the very idea of a human brotherhood in which national distinctions were obliterated. After all, the degree of unity impressed by the Roman Empire upon the different nations it embraced was superficial. On the whole it left men to walk in their own ways. In particular it did not succeed in breaking down the barriers of Jewish isolation. A society in which men should be neither Jews nor Gentiles, Greeks nor barbarians, bond nor free, but all should be welded into one manhood by the pressure of a common and constraining bond of brotherhood—a society in which even the savage and brutal Scythian should have equal fellowship with Greeks and Jews[[4]]—represented what had never yet been accomplished, and what the most sanguine might reasonably have thought impossible. The history of the Church, though not yet much more than thirty years old, had served already to emphasize the difficulty of the undertaking. We read the record of the first Jerusalem Church with its communism of love and sympathy, and it seems the perfect realization of the Christian spirit of brotherhood. So it was, but under comparatively easy conditions. For all that community were Jews with common traditions, sympathies, habits, ways of looking at things. They could behave as brethren, in the glow of their fresh enthusiasm at finding that the long-expected kingdom of Christ was now an actual fact, and its triumph to be immediately expected, without any real bridging of the gulfs which yawn between different sorts of men. That these gulfs still remained to be bridged soon appeared. It became manifest that Gentiles, 'sinners of the Gentiles,' had to be received into Christian brotherhood upon equal terms, and without their accepting the Jewish law and customs. The Council at Jerusalem attempted a compromise by requiring of the Gentile converts certain accommodations to Jewish manners. But the compromise did not avail to overcome the difficulty. St. Paul found the centre of opposition to the equal admission of the Gentiles in that very Church of Jerusalem which had been previously foremost in the race of love. In fact, the true difficulty of the law of brotherhood only then appeared when the obligation to fuse inveterate national distinctions began to be enforced. Then indeed flesh and blood rebelled. Without going any further than this single piece of Christian experience, there is every reason why St. John should warn Christians that the old commandment, 'ye shall love one another,' is constantly, with every change of circumstance, becoming 'a new commandment,' involving new difficulties, and challenging afresh the efforts of the human will[[5]]. The same difficulty, only in a less acute form, is in St. Paul's mind, and makes him measure and weigh his words, when he writes to Philemon to beg him to receive his former runaway slave, 'no longer as a slave, but as a brother beloved[[6]].'

And we cannot but pause and ask, in view of all the moral discipline for men of various kinds which St. Paul sees to be involved in the simple obligation to belong to one Christian body[[7]],—what would have been his feelings if he had heard of the doctrine which cuts at the root of all this discipline by declaring that religion is only concerned with the relation of the soul to God, and that Christians may combine as they please in as many religious bodies as suits their varying tastes?

This difficulty in the very idea of a catholic brotherhood of men explains the extraordinary earnestness with which St. Paul proceeds to emphasize that indeed this, and nothing less than this, is the divine mystery (or 'secret'), which, held back from all eternity in the mind of God, was only now being disclosed through Christ's consecrated messengers, and specially through St. Paul himself, the apostle of the Gentiles. The incredible nature of the idea clogs St. Paul's language, and almost makes shipwreck of his grammar. All the depth of Christian doctrine is necessary as background to recommend and justify this otherwise entirely 'supernatural' ideal—this marvellous climax of the workings and revelations of God. The spectacle of a catholic brotherhood, with all that it promises of universal unity beyond itself, is a lesson even to the angels of what the manifold wisdom of God can conceive and accomplish.

We have got into a habit of talking about the 'brotherhood of man' as if it was an easy and obvious truth. All our experience of our English relations with races of a different colour to our own, nay, all our experience of class divisions at home, might have served to check this easy-going sort of language. If we will consent to pause and reflect on the actual difficulty of behaving or feeling as brethren should behave and feel towards men of other races and of other educations and habits than our own, we may be more inclined to believe that it is only through some fundamental eradication of selfishness and inherent narrowness that it can be made possible; only when we begin to live from some centre greater than ourselves. And that is the moral meaning of the constant doctrine of the New Testament, that only through being reconciled to God can we be reconciled to one another—only in Christ that men can permanently and satisfactorily learn to love one another, when racial and educational and personal antipathies make for separation and not for unity.

Now perhaps we are in a position to read with greater intelligence what St. Paul wrote about 'the dispensation of the divine mystery,' i.e. 'the stewardship of the divine secret,' of the brotherhood of all men in Christ or the catholicity of the Church, which had been committed to him by the 'revelation' which followed his conversion to Christ[[8]].

The doctrine of the brotherhood of men is in fact as much a peculiarly Christian doctrine as that of divine sonship, and both alike are, in the New Testament language, represented as realized only within the community of the baptized. The facts of New Testament language compel us to say and to recognize this[[9]]. But we are bound to recognize also that they are truths which, when they are heard, are welcomed by the natural conscience everywhere. For as all men are 'God's offspring[[10]],' by the very fact of their creation as men, so they are fitted to receive the privilege of sonship: and as they are 'made of one[[11]],' so they are fitted to realize the privilege of brotherhood. It is but to say the same thing in other words, if we insist that Christians are the elect body, to realize and express among men an idea of human nature which is the only true idea, and which, overlaid and forgotten as it may have been, has never ceased to stir in man's heart and conscience everywhere. The elect are elected for no other purpose than to make manifest what all men are capable of becoming, and, if they will obey God, are destined to become.

For this cause I Paul, the prisoner of Christ Jesus in behalf of you Gentiles,—if so be that ye have heard of the dispensation of that grace of God which was given me to you-ward; how that by revelation was made known unto me the mystery, as I wrote afore in few words, whereby, when ye read, ye can perceive my understanding in the mystery of Christ; which in other generations was not made known unto the sons of men, as it hath now been revealed unto his holy apostles and prophets in the Spirit; to wit, that the Gentiles are fellow-heirs, and fellow-members of the body, and fellow-partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel, whereof I was made a minister, according to the gift of that grace of God which was given me according to the working of his power. Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, was this grace given, to preach unto the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ; and to make all men see what is the dispensation of the mystery which from all ages hath been hid in God who created all things; to the intent that now unto the principalities and the powers in the heavenly places might be made known through the church the manifold wisdom of God, according to the eternal purpose which he purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord: in whom we have boldness and access in confidence through our faith in him. Wherefore I ask that ye faint not at my tribulations for you, which are your glory.

There are a few points in this passage which still require explanation.