Once more, St. Paul's idea of the unity of the Church forbids us to conceive of it as complete in this world. Each particular church with its own organization has a certain relative completeness, but it gains all its meaning and life through fellowship in the body of Christ—the whole society of men who, having Christ for their head, live in the unity of a life derived from Him. The head of the body is out of sight. So also are the members of the body who 'are fallen asleep' but are still 'in Jesus[[11]].' It is, so to speak—and increasingly as history goes on—only the lower limbs of the body who are on the earth at any particular moment. And they find their centre of unity at no lower point than Christ, the unseen head. This idea is vigorously expressed by St. Augustine[[12]]: 'Since the whole Church is made up of the head and the body, the head is our Saviour Himself, who suffered under Pontius Pilate, who now, after He has risen from the dead, sits at the right hand of God; but the body is the Church—not this church or that, but the Church scattered over all the world; nor is it that only which exists among men now living; but they also belong to it who were before us and are to be after us to the end of the world. For the whole Church, made up of all the faithful, because all the faithful are members of Christ, has its head situate in the heavens which governs this body: though it is separated from their sight, yet it is bound to them by love."
Now it is obvious that this Pauline and Augustinian idea of church unity excludes, instead of suggesting, the Roman method of arguing for the papacy from the necessity that a body must have a head. An association of men in this world, such as the Church on earth is—a 'body of men' in this sense—may be governed in any of the various ways in which human societies are governed, not by any means necessarily by a monarch[[13]]. In this sense a body need not have a single head; or it can be ruled by a president in a council of equals. But in St. Paul's sense, the Church as a body must have a head, and that head can be none other than Christ, because, according to his spiritual physiology, from its head the Church receives its continually inflowing life; and because the body is not completely, but only partially, in this world, and the head must be over all the members, and not only over some.
iii.
But if the unity of the Church, as St. Paul expounds it, is before all else a unity of life, it is as well a unity in the truth. It is a unity based on belief in a divine revelation, given in the person of Christ—based on the common confession that Jesus crucified and risen is Christ and Lord[[14]]. To say that 'Jesus is the Lord' involves further—what is implied in this passage of the Epistle to the Ephesians—the confession of the threefold name—the 'one God and Father,' the 'one Lord' Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the 'one Spirit' which is His gift; and there can be no real question that St. Paul's language constantly involves that the Son and Spirit are with the Father really personal, and really divine, included, so to speak, in the one only eternal Godhead. A creed then is at the basis of the Christian life—a creed which finds its best expression and safeguard in the formulated doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. There is no reason to think that St. Paul, if the situation of the later Church could have been made plain to him, would have shrunk from these dogmatic safeguards of the Church's central faith.
But if we grant—what cannot really with any show of reason be denied—that the Church is a visible organization based on a certain revealed truth, which must be accepted by its members, and which admits of being formulated in order to be preserved; still this truth may be advanced and defended mainly by one of two methods—that of external regulative authority, or that of appeal to principles, discussion, controversy, exhortation. And it can hardly be denied that St. Paul prefers the latter. Sharp appeals to authority are indeed to be found in St. Paul[[15]], but they are very rare. For example, in none of his epistles against the Judaizers is the authority of the apostolic decision, as to what might and what might not be required of the Gentile Christians 'in Antioch, Syria, and Cilicia[[16]],' brought into requisition; though that decision 'settled the question.' He prefers to prove that 'circumcision is nothing.' This may be in part accounted for by St. Paul's refusal to admit that his own apostolic authority needed the support of the twelve, and by the limited area to which the decision was addressed; but there is another reason as well. For he plainly, as all his epistles show, prefers to appeal not to authority at all but to the spiritual reason; to expound principles, to argue, to awaken the heart, conscience, and mind of Christians. It must be admitted that there is very little in St. Paul's epistles about differences of doctrinal views among Christians as distinct from differences in practices. Yet there is enough—as in the vigorous passage about the 'regarding of one day above another[[17]]'—to justify the belief that he would not have viewed with any disapproval the existence in the Church of tolerated differences of opinion where they did not touch the basis of the Church's life. Such differences of view are hardly separable from what St. Paul glories in—a unity which is consistent with great variety of gifts and character, and great freedom. It is unity in variety which he has as his ideal, such a unity as is always characteristic of a unity of life, like that of nature or of a free people; or a unity, again, like that of a great Gothic Church, or of the Bible.
It is quite certain that St. Paul would have deprecated that 'short and easy' method of promoting unity which has constant recourse to the external pressure of dogma and authority.
iv.
It follows naturally from what has been just said, that St. Paul should look not so much to ecclesiastical enactments as to a right Christian temper for preserving outward unity. 'Making it your moral effort,' so we may paraphrase his exhortation to the Asiatic Christians, 'by means of the virtues which I have just specified of humility, meekness, long-suffering, and forbearance, to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of Christian peace.' The New Testament view of heresy (a self-willed separatism), or schism, is that it is a violation of charity and peace in the interests of pride and impatience and self-will. It is men like 'Diotrephes who loveth to have the pre-eminence,' who violate it. In fact it is written in history that the ecclesiastical schisms of the past have been due mainly either to the impatience and wilfulness of would-be reformers, from Tertullian downwards, or to the arrogance and love of domination in rival individuals or rival sees.
'Nothing,' says Chrysostom on this passage, 'will have power to divide the Church so much as the love of authority, and nothing provokes God so much as that the Church should be divided. We may have done ten thousand good actions, but if we rend the fulness of the Church, we shall suffer punishment with those who rent His body.'
From this point of view we may find an interesting parallel to this exhortation of St. Paul in a passage of Plato's Laws, which is, I believe, one of the few passages in pre-Christian writings where the virtue of humility is recognized. 'God, as the old tradition declares, holding in His hand the beginning, middle, and end of all that is, moves according to His nature in a straight line towards the accomplishment of His end. Justice always follows Him, and is the punisher of those who fall short of the divine law. To that law he who would be happy holds fast, and follows it in all humility and order; but he who is lifted up with pride, or money, or honour, or beauty, who has a soul hot with folly and guilt and insolence, and thinks that he has no need of a guide and ruler, but is able himself to be the guide of others, he, I say, is left deserted of God; and being thus deserted, he takes to him others who are like himself, and dances about in wild confusion; and many think that he is a great man, but in a short time he pays a penalty which justice cannot but approve, and is utterly destroyed, and his family and city with him.'