"That such a change" (in the Apostle's teaching) "is capable of being traced, has been already intimated. Both Epistles to the Thessalonians, with the exception of a few practical precepts, are the expansion and repetition of a single thought,—'the coming of Christ.' It was the absorbing thought of the Apostle and his converts, quickened in both by the persecutions which they had suffered. Not that with this expectation of Christ's kingdom there mingled any vision of a temporal rule over the kingdoms of the earth. That was far from the Apostle. But there was that in it which fell short of the more perfect truth. It was not, 'The kingdom of God is within you'; but, 'Lo here, and lo there.' It was defined by time, and was to take place within the Apostle's own life. The images in which it clothed itself were traditional among the Jews; they were outward and visible, liable to the misconstruction of the enemies of the faith, and to the misapprehension of the first converts,—imperfectly, as the Apostle saw afterwards, conveying the inward and spiritual meaning. The kingdom which they described was not eternal and heavenly, but very near and present, ready to burst forth everywhere, and by its very nearness in point of time seeming to touch our actual human state. Afterwards the kingdom of God appeared to remove itself within, to withdraw into the unseen world. The earthen vessel must be broken first, the unbeliever unclothed that he might be clothed upon, that mortality may be swallowed up of life. He was no longer 'waiting for the Son from heaven'; but 'desirous to depart and be with Christ' (Phil. i. 23). Such is the change, not so much in the Apostle's belief as in his mode of conception; a change natural to the human mind itself, and above all to the Jewish mind; a change which, after it had taken place, left the vestiges of the prior state in the Montanism of the second century, which may not improperly be regarded as the spirit of the first century overliving itself. Old things had passed away, and, behold, all things became new. And yet the former things—the material vision of Christ's kingdom—have ever been prone to return; not only in the first and second century, but in every age of enthusiasm, men have been apt to walk by sight and not by faith. In the hour of trouble and perplexity, when darkness spreads itself over the earth, and Antichrist is already come, they have lifted up their eyes to the heavens, looking for the sign of the Son of man."—Vol. I. p. 10.
If to announce the coming of Christ is to "know him according to the flesh," St. Paul assuredly did not keep his resolve "henceforth to know him no more." For the expectation reappears, without any perceptible change, in his later Epistles; as in Rom. xiii. 11, 12: "Do this the rather, knowing the time,—that now is the time to awake out of sleep: for our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed: the night is far spent; the day is at hand";—and in Phil. iv. 5: "The Lord is at hand."[65] Moreover, it is utterly impossible that this element of his teaching could be adduced in proof of his "preaching circumcision." It had nothing to do with the question of Jew and Gentile; with the most opposite solutions of which it is equally compatible.
In truth, our author has here combined two passages, which throw no light on one another, and has extracted from each what neither is able to yield. The words (in Gal. v. 11) "if I still preach circumcision," do not really imply that the Apostle once did so preach; though in an accurate writer this sense might be insisted on. He is not thinking of his own former notions, but of other people's, continuing unaltered after they ought to have changed. There were persons who, in spite of the dispensation of the Spirit, still preached circumcision after its significance was gone. This did not Paul; but he was charged with doing so: and he says, "Well, if so, I am a Judaizer like you, and I cannot be also chargeable with teaching that the cross of Christ supersedes the Law." The true sense is, therefore, given by the rendering, "If I preach circumcision still,"—that is, as still necessary; and no tale is told of the Apostle's earlier teaching.
The other passage (2 Cor. v. 16) does undoubtedly refer to a former state of the writer's own mind, when he "recognized Christ according to the flesh." But he alludes, we apprehend, to the period when he was a "Hebrew of the Hebrews"; and had no conception as yet of a suffering, dying, and heavenly Christ;—when he was full of the thoughts still occupying the twelve, who did not take in the significance of the cross, but carried past it their old Messianic notions. "There may have been a time," he means to say, "when I thought only of a national, Israelitish, historical Messiah, bound by the law of his fathers, and binding to it. Had this been the true conception of him, then would it have been a matter of privilege and pride to be near his person, to stand in natural relations with him, and be mixed up with the incidents of his local career. But ever since I understood the cross, and saw that Messiah's life began in death, a far other truth has dawned upon me. When he gave up the ghost, all the accidents of his humanity—his lineage, his nationality, his earthly manifestation—were left behind and died away; and they must carry with them into extinction whatever feelings had collected round them,—family pride, Jewish exclusiveness, and the memories of personal companionship. From that moment, clear of earthly entanglements, Christ in the spirit draws to him a community of human spirits,—one with him in self-abnegation, dying to the earthly past; one with him in re-birth, living to heavenly union with God. Thus, if any one be in Christ, it amounts to a new creation; his old self has passed away; behold, all things have become new." The Apostle, therefore, sets up the death of Christ, as cutting off, for all disciples, the prior time from the subsequent; as flinging the former, with all the human conceptions that cling to it, into eclipse and annihilation, and beginning a new and luminous existence in the latter; as breaking the very identity of the believer, and delivering him from the thraldom of nature into the freedom of the Spirit. The cross had already done its work ere St. Paul became a disciple. He had never known his Lord but in the spirit; and the "Christ," whom he had "known according to the flesh," was the Jewish Messiah of his previous and unconverted conception. Mr. Stanley's objection, that the Apostle could hardly have spoken of his unconverted state without stronger condemnation, might perhaps hold, were the allusions to his fit of persecuting violence against the Church. But there was no occasion for self-reproach in describing the picture of a national Messiah, on which, in common with his countrymen, he had permitted his imagination to dwell.[66]
Neither, then, from his own direct assertion, nor from comparison of his several writings, inter se, do we learn anything of the alleged development of the Apostle's doctrine. There is no element in it, that, from inability to co-exist with the rest, requires to be assigned to a date of its own. The breach with Judaism, especially, we conceive to have been complete from the first, and unsusceptible of degrees; nay, to have been the initial principle of his conversion, the secretly prepared condition or tendency of mind that rendered him accessible to the Divine call, and open to sudden change in the direction of his character. When first released from the formulas of a Jewish Christology, and communing in spirit with a heavenly and universal Lord, his mind would doubtless be met by a multitude of new problems, and would work freely towards their resolution, with the quickening consciousness of new light streaming in, and a grander landscape of Providence opening before him. The very intensity of this inward action, however,—the thirst it sustains for its own completion,—forbids us to attribute to it a life-long duration; ere fifteen years were passed, its force would be spent by having realized its work, and attained the equilibrium of a holy peace. Whatever subsequent changes occurred would be of a different nature, enforced by the turn of the world's affairs; a mere remoulding or reproportioning of inward faiths, in adaptation to the altered pressures of the hour. Of such modifications, such retreat towards the background of once favorite ideas, and advance of dim suggestions into strong light, there are doubtless examples in St. Paul. The expectation of Christ's speedy coming to close the world's affairs, and realize "the kingdom," could not but dominate at first, and pale every other interest and belief by the terror and glory of its light. But there is a limit beyond which the strain of longing cannot be sustained; as it subsides, the present and actual recovers power, and pushes its problems forward, and gains once more the eye that had looked beyond them. And so, after a while, spring up questions of Christian order that will not bear to be put off;—how to live in a world that, however near its doom, entangles the disciple still in a web of difficult relations; how to touch the skirt of its idolatries, and not be tainted; how to behave to wife and child in this last generation of human affairs; how to seal up the passions that ought to die within the saints, but were not dead; how to prevent the gifts of the Spirit from overbalancing themselves, on the heights of a dizzied mind, into outrages on nature; how to preserve to the woman and the slave, in their exulting reaction from degraded life, the sense of modest reverence, and the appreciation of faithful service. Day by day questions of this kind insisted on attention, and brought out a fresh type of sentiments proper for their determination, and offering to view a new side of the Christian thought and life. Nor, again, could many years elapse, before the Jew and Gentile difficulty changed its whole aspect, and expanded, from a petty scruple compromised at Jerusalem, into a world-wide theology, regulative of all future history. When it became evident that it was no question about a small sprinkling of ethnic converts,—mere hangers-on of Hebrew families and synagogues; when the delay of Messiah, and the energy of Paul, gave occasion for thousands to pour in; when it seemed imminent that Palestine should be outvoted and overpowered by the growth of the foreign Gospel, the alarm of the Judaic Christians became great. They tracked Paul's steps; their emissaries were everywhere; their arguments and doctrine became more constricted, and his more wide and free; and as the clouds visibly lowered over Israel, touching him as well as them with gloom, all the more did he see the sunshine flood the lands beyond; and his national trust assumed this form,—that, maybe, the outlying heavenly light may creep back as the dark hour passes, and again set the shadows moving on the hills it has so long glorified. The Apostle died before the question settled itself by the mere force of the facts,—by the utter breaking up of the Jewish nation, and the inpouring Gentile numbers. Others waited to be driven into catholicity by events; it is his glory to have surrendered himself to the inspiration that implanted in him its principle from the first. He lived, however, to see a mighty growth, though not the final fruit; and the grand scale on which he conducts the controversy, in his Epistle to the Romans, by converging reasonings fetched from afar out of history, and aloft out of the perfections of God, and deep out of human nature, shows how his thought expands with the exigencies of experience, and advances to fill the whole greatness of his opportunities.
There can be no doubt that the earliest Apostolic Christianity consisted mainly in the faith of Christ's coming again, "to-day, or to-morrow, or the third day." This event, with its effect on the living, was the one only point, Mr. Stanley conceives, on which St. Paul, in his great chapter on the Resurrection, professed to have a distinct revelation:—
"On one point only he professes to have a distinct revelation, and that not with regard to the dead, but to the living. So firmly was the first generation of Christians possessed of the belief that they should live to see the second coming, that it is here assumed as a matter of course; and their fate, as near and immediate, is used to illustrate the darker and more mysterious subject of the fate of those already dead. That vision of 'the last man,' which now seems so remote as to live only in poetic fiction, was to the Apostle an awful reality; but it is brought forward only to express the certainty that, even here, a change must take place, the greatest that imagination can conceive."—Vol. I. p. 398.
That this belief, where held at all, should be paramount and absorbing, follows from its very nature. Accordingly, St. Paul, as Mr. Jowett remarks, makes even the essence of the Gospel to consist in it:—
"It appears remarkable, that St. Paul should make the essence of the Gospel consist, not in the belief in Christ, or in taking up the cross of Christ, but in the hope of his coming again. Such, however, was the faith of the Thessalonian Church; such is the tone and spirit of the Epistle. Neither in the Apostolic times, nor in our own, can we reduce all to the same type. One aspect of the Gospel is more outward, another more inward; one seems to connect with the life of Christ, another with his death; one with his birth into the world, another with his coming again. If we will not insist on determining the times and the seasons, or on knowing the manner how, all these different ways may lead us within the veil. The faith of modern times embraces many parts and truths; yet we allow men, according to their individual character, to dwell on this truth or that, as more peculiarly appropriate to their nature. The faith of the early Church was simpler and more progressive, pausing in the same way on a particular truth, which the circumstances of the world or the Church brought before them."—Vol. I. p. 46.