Life of St Athanasius the Great and Account of Arianism

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128 Pages (Part I)

Page 21

We now turn to the Apostles. Here a few brief remarks must suffice. (A suggestive summary in Sanday, 'What the first Christians thought about Christ,' Oxford House Papers, First Series.) That S. Paul's summary of the Gospel (1 Cor. xv. 3 sqq.) is given by him as common ground between himself and the older Apostles follows strictly from the fact that the verb used (parelabon) links the facts of Redemption (v. 3, 4) with the personal experiences of the original disciples (5 sqq.). In fact it is not in dispute that the original Jewish nucleus of the Apostolic Church preached Jesus as the Messiah, and His death as the ground of forgiveness of sins (Pfleiderer, Urchrist. p. 20; Acts ii. 36, 38; iii. 26; iv. 12, &c.; the 'Hebraic colouring' of these early chapters is very characteristic and important). The question is, however, how much this implied as to the Divine Personality of the Saviour; how far the belief of the Apostles and their contemporaries was uniform and explicit on this point. Important light is thrown on this question by the controversy which divided S. Paul from the mass of Jewish Christians with respect to the observance of the Law. Our primary source of knowledge here is Galatians, ch. ii. We there learn that while S. Paul regarded this question as involving the whole essence of the Gospel, and resisted every attempt to impose circumcision on Gentile Christians, the older Apostles conceded the one point regarded as central, and, while reserving the obligation of the Law on those born under it (which S. Paul never directly assailed, 1 Cor. vii. 18) recognised the Gospel of the uncircumcision as legitimate. This concession, as the event proved, conceded everything; if the 'gospel of the uncircumcision' was sufficient for salvation, circumcision became a national, not a religious principle. Now this whole question was fundamentally a question about Christ. Men who believed, or were willing to grant, that the Law uttered from Sinai by the awful voice of the Most High Himself was no longer the supreme revelation of God, the one divinely ordained covenant of righteousness, certainly believed that some revelation of God different in kind (for no revelation of God to man could surpass the degree of Ex. xxxiii. 11) had taken place, an unique revelation of God in man. The revelation of God in Christ, not the revelation of God to Moses, was the one fact in the world's history; Sinai was dwarfed in comparison of Calvary. But it must be observed that while the older Apostles, by the very recognition of the gospel of the uncircumcision, went thus far with S. Paul, S. Paul realised as a central principle what to others lay at the circumference. What to the one was a result of their belief in Christ was to him the starting-point, from which logical conclusions were seen to follow, practical applications made in every direction. At the same time S. Paul taught nothing about Christ that was not implied in the belief of the older Apostles, or that they would not have felt impelled by their own religious position to accept. In fact it was their fundamental union in the implicit belief of the divinity of the Lord that made possible any agreement between S. Paul and the Jewish Apostles as to the gospel of the uncircumcision.

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