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3.15 - A History of Christianity in the Apostolic Age
The Christianity of Paul
Paul's Impact on Christianity
We have been concerned is this chapter, not with Paul's missionary labors, not with the circumstances which led him to take the course he did as an apostle, but only with the principles that underlay his work. Those principles he reached in the early days of his Christian life, as a direct result of the revelation of the Son of God within him, and they must have been already understood and clearly formulated before he began his work as a Christian evangelist. Upon them his labors were based from the very commencement of his career.
It has been maintained by many, it is true, that his Gospel was worked out slowly and gradually, and that it took shape only under the stress of conflict and after years of active service; and an effort has been made by some scholars to trace a development in his conception of Christianity, even during the period within which his extant epistles were written; attention being called to the fact that the Christianity of the First Epistle to the Thessalonians is of a much simpler character than the Christianity, for instance, of the Epistle to the Romans. [Cf. e.g. Sabatier, Matheson, and Clemen (Chronologie der Paulinischen Briefe, 1893; S. 255 sq.) On the other side see Bruce, l.c. p. 6 sq.]
Moreover, it was written some years after the events at Jerusalem and at Antioch, of which he tells us in Gal. 2., and consequently the fact that in it the fundamental principles which are emphasized to such an extent in Romans, Corinthians, and Galatians, have almost no place, cannot be urged as an indication of their later development, for his conduct both at Jerusalem and at Antioch presupposes those principles.
It is therefore vain to attempt to discover any essential development in Paul's general conception of Christianity after the time of the writing of the earliest of his extant epistles. [This is still more evident if Galatians is the earliest of Paul's epistles, as I believe it to be.] That development lay back of the great controversy, back indeed of the beginning of his missionary work among the Gentiles. It was not due to the experience gained in that work, for the work presupposes the development.
Indeed, there is little in it htat may not have belonged to the earliest days of the Christian life, to a time before he preached the Gospel to either Jew or Gentile. His pre-Christian experience and the circumstances of his conversion were such as inevitably to lead to that very Gospel which we find presented years later in his great epistles.
It is impossible to imagine what the Gospel of his earlier Christian years could have been, if it was not that Gospel. It is impossible to conceive of his stopping short of the controlling conception that we find him holding until the end. It was doubtless in the period immediately succeeding his conversion, during the time that preceded his entrance upon his career as an apostle, that he worked out the great problems wrapped up in his conversion, and reached convictions which he held substantially unaltered throughout the remainder of his life. [It is not meant, of course, that no development took place in connection with any of Paul's conceptions during the period represented by his epistles. In some matters, as, for instance, God's ultimate purpose for the Jews, which he discusses in his Epistle to the Romans, Paul's views may have developed considerably after the writing of the Epistle to the Galatians. And so some features that very likely formed no part of his thought when he wrote his earlier letters mark the Christology that appears in the epistles of the imprisonment. And yet the development both here and in other lines involved only details, and did not affect his fundamental positions. The contents of the several epistles will be considered in the next chapter, and such development as actually did take place in Paul's views will then appear.]
Those convictions were the fruit not of instruction received from Christ's apostles, nor of a knowledge of the teaching of Jesus gained by Paul before or after he became a Christian, but of the revelation of the Son of God within him, and of his won spiritual experience resulting therefrom. His conceptions, consequently, bore a very different form from the conceptions to which Jesus himself gave utterance, and yet they were in the main in harmony with the Master's spirit and tendency.
Paul's pre-Christian experience had been just such as to prepare him for that complete renunciation of personal merit and personal pride, and that complete dependence upon God, which were fundamental with Christ. And so in his emphasis upon the Christian life as the divine life in man, and upon the Christian's release form bondage to an external law because of the divine life within him which is its own law, Paul was in essential sympathy though not in formal agreement with the Master. In his occasional references to the divine bestowal of knowledge and power, [see Matt. 11:27, 13:11, 16:17, 19:26; Mark 13:11, etc.] and in his promise to be with his disciples in spirit, Christ certainly gave some warrant to the developed view to which fatherhood, and in his emphasis upon love as the substance of the law, he really justified Paul in his denial of all legalism. [There can be no doubt that it was directly due to the influence of Jesus' teaching that Paul recognized the law of love as constituting the principle of the Christian life.]
Thus, though with his more abstract conception of God and man, and with his sharp contrast between flesh and spirit, Paul held views in many respects different from Christ's, and much less simple and popular that his, he was in sympathy with the spirit of the Master, and he must be recognized as the disciple who most fully understood him, and most truly carried on his work.
And yet, not to the teaching of Christ, but to the teaching of Paul, does the church owe its controlling emphasis upon the Saviour's death; and not to the former, but to the latter, is chiefly due its recognition of him as a Redeemer from sin. It was by Paul, indeed, that the way was opened for a deeper conception of the significance of Christ's work, and for a loftier conception of his personality than had prevailed among his immediate disciples. Even though Paul was understood by very few, and even though his Gospel of the complete liberty of the Christian man found almost no acceptance, his emphasis upon the significance of Christ's death, and upon the divineness of the nature, had wide and permanent influence, and in the end essentially modified the thinking of the church at large. Not Jesus the Messiah, but Jesus Christ the divine Saviour, was thenceforth increasingly, as time passed, the object of Christian faith and worship.
Used by permission of the publisher.
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