Paul and Christian Imperialism

We have now arrived at that stage of Paul’s Christian experience in which it was to become a worldexperience. Christ had hitherto been to him the all of existence; he was now to become the All “in all.’* Up to this time He had been simply the secret of Paul’s life; He was now to be revealed as the secret of universal life, the presence and the power that filled all things. The steps by which this fulness of Christ was realised were to be the steps of a descending ladder. We have already seen that Paul’s progress in the knowledge of Christ moved in a precisely opposite direction to that of the original apostles. They began with the human Jesus, and had to ascend to the conception of the Christ dwelling in the heavens; he began with the Christ dwelling in the heavens, and had to descend to the thought of the human Jesus. His conception of Christ’s union with humanity had already been completed so far -as he himself was concerned, but it was still inadequate as regarded the world. In his progressive descent of the humanitarian ladder he had not yet reached that step in which the Christian principle united itself with the secular life. The religion which he had left had been a theocracy, a rule of God over the whole world. But the new religion had not as yet to him become theocratic; it had hitherto only ruled himself. The time was coming in which he was to behold it in larger proportions, to discern its wider scope, and to recognise its universal bearing. The period of Paul’s life which was to exhibit this broader view of Christianity is that which comprehends the group of his epistles from the letter to the Church of Philippi to the second letter to Timothy. They may be called distinctively the epistles of the captivity. With perhaps a partial and inconsiderable break, the environment of Paul’s subsequent life was to be that Roman capital whose vision had stimulated him into a wider spiritual path. He had all along intended to visit Rome, but he had not expected to reach it in the way in which he ultimately did. He had planned to come as a missionary; in point of fact he came as a prisoner. At first sight it might appear that in this respect his missionary dream had been dispelled. It might seem that to reach Rome as a prisoner was for him equivalent to not reaching Rome at all. He himself, at all events, took the opposite view of this matter;1 he regarded his bonds as a gain. Nor is it hard to see that he had grounds for such congratulation. The man who had appeared as a political prisoner before three Judean governors, and who had come to Rome with the express purpose of vindicating the loyalty of his faith before a criminal tribunal, was in a much

* Phil. 1. 13, and sequel.

higher position of influence, notwithstanding his bonds, than would have been occupied by an itinerant Jewish missionary wandering after the counsel of his will. It is safe to affirm that such a missionary would never have wandered into the focus of metropolitan power, never have seen Rome at its centre. But, coming as a political prisoner, Paul came instantaneously into the centre. He was brought into the vicinity at once of the highest and of the lowest, was placed in a position both to review and to be interviewed. His earliest influence fell precisely upon that class which formed the nucleus of the empire — the military. In reaching the military, he put his foot at once upon that ladder which communicated with every grade of the Roman world, which led upwards to the throne of the Ca3sars and downwards to the life of the populace. Looking on that ladder, Paul had a glimpse, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, of the whole system of that wondrous polity which had secured and retained the allegiance of bhe world.

And in that glimpse of the Roman empire there broke upon the mind of Paul a discovery which exerted an important influence on all his subsequent writings. He found that, notwithstanding the ladder of communication between the heights and the depths of Uie empire, there was in point of fact very little communication itself. Rome had aimed at the establishment of a unity between all parts of the State. But Paul found that the unity which had been attained was after all only an external one. The link between the highest and the lowest was simply the binding of an outward chain; the highest never itself came into actual contact with the lowest. Paul in short discovered that the empire had a defect in its own machinery, and precisely in that part of its mechanism of which it was most proud — the interpenetration of its members. He saw that in the deepest sense there was no such interpenetration. He felt that the empire was deficient in that very point at which it had chiefly aimed, and he felt that Christianity alone could supply this deficiency. He had come to Rome to defend his loyalty; how could he better accomplish this end than by indicating to the Roman citizen the true mode of realising his own ideal?

That this thought passed through the mind of Paul is to me evident from a passage written at an early stage of his captivity. In one of the epistles of his Roman imprisonment he thus speaks of Christ: l l Now that He ascended, what is it but that He also descended first into the lower parts of the earth? He that descended is the same also that ascended up far above all heavens, that He might fill all things.”1 I do not think these words can be adequately understood without reference to Paul’s special environment. He was standing in the metropolis of the world and looking at the world in its heights and depths. Between its heights and its depths he saw no communion. There were men that went up the ladder and there were men that came down, but the men who went up were not the same as the men that came down. There were many instances of elevation

i Eph. iv. 9, 10.

whereby the sons of the people reached the heights of the empire, and there were many instances ol depression whereby the leaders of the empire were precipitated to the level of the people. But to the eye of Paul there did not present itself any instance of a life, which had risen to the heights, voluntarily descending again to the depths in order to elevate his fellows. There were numberless illustrations of successful ambition, of arduous climbing rewarded by attainment of the goal. But the ambition never seemed to pass into ministration. It did not strike the man who had reached the goal that he had reached it for a purpose, that the measure of his power was the measure of his human responsibility. It did not strike him that the attainment of personal power was only valuable in so far as it opened up a road to human helpfulness. There is no profit to the valleys in the mere fact of ascending to the moun tains, unless the design of the ascent is a subsequent descent, a communication to the valleys of the mountain light.

Such was the thought of Paul as through the windows of his prison he surveyed the empire. Now it seemed to him that Christianity could have furnished an ideal which would have enabled the Roman world to supply this defect, and I believe it was this idea which prompted him to use the language of the Ephesian epistle to which we have referred. Divested of all figure and separated from all local colouring, the passage seems to me to amount to this: “In your metropolis there is no communication between the men who ascend and the men who descend, and, because there is no communication, your own ideal of empire is not realised. But we, Christians, worship an ideal whose exaltation is only precious because it is the result of a voluntary depression; in our empire the Man who goes up is the same Man who once went down. We commemorate His ascension into power because He has ascended into a power from which He once descended. He desired to fill all things, to join the extremities of the social ladder. In obedience to that desire He emptied Himself. He came down into the haunts of human misery, of squalor, of crime; He made trial by contact of what He had only known afar off. He had all along the right to rule by power, but He desired to rule by sympathy. He wished His government to be no arbitrary one but a government built upon the wants of men, responsive to those needs of the lowest which are the needs of all. He came down to learn these wants, and He has ascended only to give them effect. His ascension is the lifting up of humanity; He has carried into the highest the report of those things which are required by the lowliest; in the worship of His imperialism we commemorate the filling of all things.”

Such is, I believe, a paraphrase of the thought which Paul meant to convey in this passage of Ephesians. It was dictated by a sense of that deficiency which he observed in the working out of the Roman ideal, by a desire to present the empire with a new and higher ideal which, even while transcending its own, would enable its own to be realised. Paul meant to suggest that, if men would take the

Christian ideal as their standard of heroism, they would themselves be constrained to repeat the same process of ministration. His aim is not to inculcate a dogma; it is to inspire a common life. In a passage which, whether written earlier or later, is almost contemporaneous, he expresses this aim still more pronouncedly. “Let this mind be in you,” he says, “which was also in Christ Jesus.” He then goes on to tell his hearers what mind it was that he desires to be in them. He describes the history of that mind as the history of a descent from the highest height of power to the lowest depth of humiliation. He traces its downward course step by step until it reaches the common ground where all life claims brotherhood, — from the form of God to the form of an angelic servant, from the form of an angelic servant to the likeness of a man, from the likeness of a man in his glory to the fashion of a man in his transitoriness, from the shifting fashion of the human to the final stage of the mortal — death. And then, having brought the Son of man to this lowest ground of abasement, the Jewish captive turns round and addresses his captors. He declares that their imperialism was excelled by the majesty of the Crucified. He declares that, not in gpite of but by reason of this humiliation, He had risen into a height of empire before which theirs must bow, “Wherefore God hath highly exalted Him, and given Him a name that is above every name: that to the name of Jesus every knee should bend, of things in heaven and things in earth, and things under the earth.” *

i Phil. 11. 5-10.

What did Paul mean to teach the Roman world by the presentation of such an ideal? Nothing less than a new model of government, a model which, without one change in its existing constitution, might instantaneously become its own. He meant to tell it that hitherto it had failed to realise, failed to utilise, the resources of its own dominion, that its empire was smaller in extent and less powerful in regal authority than it ever ought to have been. It had sought to bind together the fragments of the world from without; the only certain bond was a union from within. There was no empire whose extent could be compared to the empire of the heart; he who should conquer that, was king indeed. But he who would conquer that, must stoop to the uttermost, nethermost. He must come down to those common wants which lie at the base of all life, and which, because they lie at the base, are alone fitted to be the binding chain of humanity. At the middle of the ladder men cannot be united; the wants there are artificial, and they are exchanged hour by hour. But at the foot the wants of men are common and permanent. Hunger, thirst, cold, weariness, moments of isolation, forms of poverty, imminent shadows of death, are absent from no special caste, and are found at all times. They are felt by Caesar as much as by his household. What if Caesar could be brought to feel them/o?* his household! What if his position at the top of the ladder, instead of removing him above the cries of the multitude, should bring him more into contact with these cries! What if, just because he stood on the height, he were made in a special sense susceptible of impressions from below, in a special sense recipient of the plaints and sorrows of the valleys beneath!

It is at this stage, at this moment when the sins and sorrows of the empire are pressing on his mind, that there breaks upon the view of the apostle what I cannot otherwise describe than as a new thought — a thought which amounts to nothing less than the discovery of an outer membership in the body oi Christ. From the days when he wrote his first epistle to the Corinthians, the figure which he had adopted to ex press the communion between Christ and His people was the idea of that connection which subsists between the head and the members of a human body. The headship of Christ had become to him a dearer expression than the kingdom of Christ, and there is no wonder. For the head of a body is a conception not only different from, but in some respects the reverse of, the king of a state. The king of a state rules by giving his impressions to the members; the head ot a body rules by receiving its impressions from the members. The king governs by commanding; the head in one sense may be said to reign by obeying. The king is the first mover and the members are his servants; the head only begins to act after the communication of the members, and may be called the servant f all. It is not surprising, therefore, that to the mind of Paul this latter figure should have become a peculiarly endearing symbol for expressing the relations of the communion-table. To be a member of Christ’s body was to make Christ recipient of all those impressions of pain which existed in the heart of the creature; His capacity for headship was itself His capacity for suffering.

In all this there was nothing new to Paul. It was the thought which had dominated his mind since the second period of his Christian life — that period in which he began to realise eternity not merely as an existence of the future but as an existence of the present hour. But now, standing under the shadow of the Roman empire, there flashes upon his mind a thought which certainly seems to me an addition to his past experience. Hitherto, the membership in Christ’s body had been viewed by him simply in its relation to the Church. In his epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians a new leaf is added to the communion-table, and he declares, almost in so many words, that the members of the state are also parts of the body of Christ. In these epistles he appears to me for the first time to extend the sacramental relation from the inner to the outer court of the tabernacle. I base this opinion not upon his recognition of Christ’s Messianic reign over the nations; that was an idea as old as Judaism itself. But the point here is, that the Messianic reign itself is represented as a bodily burden-bear ing. Christ bears the pains not only of the members but of those things which the members have touched. There is a sacramental continuity established between the Church and the world, so that He who carries the burdens of the Church carries the burdens of the world too. * ‘He gave Him to be head over all things;“1 “Ye are complete in Him, which is the head of all principality and power.”2 Let us

i Eph. 1. 22. * Col. 11. 10.

observe what is implied in this language. Nothing less than the clothing of secular royalty in a new and sacrificial symbol. Hitherto, headship had been the prerogative of the priest; it was now declared to be the prerogative of the king. In the eyes of the Roman world, in the eyes of praetor, proconsul, senate, emperor, there is flashed the image of a kingdom not before seen amongst the Gentiles, not be fore seen amongst the Jews, — a kingdom whose characteristic is service, whose watchword is priesthood, whose sceptre is sacrifice, and whose strength of power is the weight of its burden-bearing.

Such is the new figure of empire which breaks forth in those writings of St. Paul that bear the impress of the Roman captivity. Foreshadowed in the epistle to the Romans, promulgated in the epistle to the Ephesians, and reiterated in the epistle to the Colossians, it becomes henceforth not only the centre of his religious thought but the root of his humanitarian sympathy. Sacrifice takes a new and a higher place in his system. It is no longer merely the cloud which obscured for a time the empire of the Son of man; it is itself the empire of the Son of man, the source of His authority, the sceptre of His throne. It is no longer simply the impediment which must be got rid of ere the kingdom shall come; it is itself the coming of the kingdom. l The exaltation of Christ is henceforth with Paul not the conquest but the result of His cross. If He has received a name before which every knee must bend, it is because He Himself has

i Of. Col. 1. 1L bent the knee to humanity. To crown Christ simply as a king is to crown Him on the ground that He has risen above the circumstances of human pain and human weakness; but to crown Him as the head is to put the diadem on His brow on precisely the opposite ground — on the ground that human pain and weakness have become universally His own.

In assigning to the Son of man this transformed ideal of government, Paul was really idealising it for all time. In the precincts of his lonely dungeon he was effecting a greater revolution than he had wrought through all his missionary labors. He was putting into the hearts of men a thought that was to germinate and grow. Quite unconsciously to himself, he was at that hour the maker of modern history. He was weaving a conception of empire which was destined to captivate and to dominate the human mind. He was striking the first decided blow at dominions, and principalities, and powers, — at every form of government in which the will of the individual had aspired to obliterate the will of the community. He was occupying the position of a political protestant. He was advocating the right of each man to be an integral part of the state, proclaiming the duty of each sovereign to bear the burdens of those beneath him. He did not pro pose such a goal as a limit to imperialism but as an extension of the boundaries of empire. He proposed it as the highest conceivable kind of government, as the only kind of government which would ultimately exert a universal and a permanent sway. If he had offered the suggestion in the interest of a democracy, it would inevitably have perished at its birth; it would have been crushed by the power of the Ca3sars. But when he offered it as a wreath to his own Divinity, when he proclaimed it as a thought which he would like to see realised in the empire of the Son of man, he immediately disarmed all criticism. He was presenting to the imperial world an ideal of government constructed in its own interests, constructed with a view to the enlargement and consolidation of the title of king. He was assigning this ideal to no earthly potentate but to the Being whom he himself worshipped as Divine. To the Roman world, therefore, his attitude was the reverse of revolutionary. Nay, that world had already in some sense been prepared for the new evangel. The idea was half in the air. His theory of government was to the Latins what his sermon on Mars’ Hill was to the Greeks, — an amplification of that thought after which they had been seeking, and whose imperfection had impeded their own progress. Seneca had but recently told his Roman countrymen that they were members of a Divine body; Paul put a head upon the body and made it human.

From this time forth the Christian creed became in its essence humanitarian. It had all along been so in its practice. On the lips of the Divine Founder Christianity had taken the form of a religion adapted to the wants of man as man; His own favourite name had been the Son of man. With the dawn of theological systems there had come the danger of a limitation; the servants of Christ had for a time been separated from the common earth and placed on a mountain apart. But with the realisation of this new thought heaven and earth again met together. To say that Christ was the head of principalities was to give Him a far wider range than merely to say that He was the head of the Christian body. As the head of the Christian body He could only come into contact with man in his religion; as the head of principalities He came into contact with man in his manhood. The inner circle of membership still remained, but an outer circle was added to it. There was still a communion of faith wherein the Master met in an upper room with His disciples; but in addition to this there was another communion wherein the Master came into contact with those who were not His disciples — a communion in which He met the multitude in the desert, and broke the bread to them on the ground of their hunger alone. To sit at the head of the inner table was to have communion with man on the ground of his religious affinity. But to sit at the head of the outer table was to have communion with man on the ground of his being a creature. It was to stoop beneath the sphere of religious affinity into the sphere of nature. It was to become the high priest of the uncircumcised, of the unclean, of the unre deemed. It was to become affected with want be cause it was want. It was to take up into His sympathy the great fact of sorrow, irrespective of its origin and independently of its cause, to incorporate sufferings which perhaps were even now the fruit of sin, and which, just because they were sufferings, had become the prerogative of royalty. Therefore, in this bold figure of secular headship we have the dawn of a humanitarian Christianity — a dawn whose full unfolding was perhaps invisible even to the apostle himself, but which yet bore within it the germ of boundless possibilities. The conception of God’s kingdom which it suggested was one which was to bear fruit undreamt of in the philosophy of that time, one which was to influence the course of future governments and to turn into new channels the stream of old faiths. It was one of the most silent movements in the whole history of man, yet it set in motion a train of consequences whose force Is not yet expended and whose issues are still un realised.

But, what we are here concerned with is the effect )f the new conception on the mind of Paul himself. We have seen that the history of Paul’s mind has been hitherto the history of a development in which the spirit of the man has descended from the heavenly to the earthly sphere. We have seen how, beginning with the vision of the glorified Christ, and finding, therefore, his first Christian ideal in the thought of something which transcends the earth, he has yet been step by step descending the Jacob’s ladder. Starting with the Divine and superhuman, we have found him approaching ever nearer to the mundane and the earthly. The goal towards which he tended was, as I have said, precisely the opposite of that which was the goal of the other apostles. Their starting-point was to be his landing-place. They looked first upon the human Christ and thence rose up to the Divine; he looked first upon the Divine Christ and thence came down to the human. He began with the Christ of resurrection, the life that had risen above the changes of the world. His original theology, therefore, bore a character corresponding to such a vision; it dealt with themes which were rather intellectual than practical, rather speculative than utilitarian. But in proportion as he approached the starting-point of the first disciples, in proportion as he came into contact with the traces of Christ’s human ministry, his own teaching became more human. It was not that he changed his system; it was rather that he saw a new and wider application for his system. He perceived that the doctrine and work of the Master had a wider bearing than he had originally supposed, that they were not simply tokens of admission into another world but means for managing the affairs of this. He perceived that the deepest power of the Gospel lay in its adaptation to present need, in its provision for the wants of tho hour, in its capacity to support the burdens of earthly life. To him, in short, Christianity was ever more and more revealed as a secular force, the most powerful and influential of all secular forces — a force which had its province in the commonplace duties of the day, and which must find its consummation in the civilising of the united world.

Such is the order of Paul’s development — a development from the celestial to the mundane. There are times in the history of every man in which the order of his development is quickened. There are moments of acceleration in which the natural fruit of years is compressed into the growth of months. Such a moment had now come to Paul. His course, hitherto, had been steadily towards the earthly and the human, but it was now to be rapidly so. The crisis of his life was his Roman captivity. It placed him in an instant at the very centre of the world’s movement and showed him man in all his phases. It revealed to him the need of a larger and a wider scheme of salvation than he had hitherto conceived. It taught him the necessity of a contact between the Divine and the human based on broader lines than those of assimilation, a contact which should have its ground not alone in the creature’s faith but in the creature’s need. It led him to the conclusion that man’s claim to the Divine sustenance is not his fulness but his emptiness. It showed him that the ultimate meeting-place between the Infinite and the finite was the creature’s sense of want, and that, in the power to come into contact with this want, the kingdom of God had passed from the empire of sovereignty into the empire of headship.

Here, then, is the task which now lies before us — to unfold the steps of that process by which Paul realised the full scope and bearing of this new conception. “Unfold” is, indeed, the most appropriate word. The idea of government at which Paul had now arrived was already an all-embracing idea; it comprehended within itself the minutest details of secular life, and there was no limit to its far-reachingness. But just on this account its full scope could not at once be seen — not even by the man who had conceived it. To the mind of Paul, as we have seen, the idea at first came only in its religious garb, or, to speak more correctly, in a garb distinguished from the world. Like everything else in his development, this thought had to work downwards, had to descend from the skies to the plains. It was originally no more than the ideal of a heavenly life, a life worth admiring and worth aspiring to. Paul did not at once perceive that if a man came to admire that heavenly life, there would be a transformation of all secular life. He did not at once perceive that such an idea as the headship of Christ could not be anything without being everything, could not take possession of the throne of theology without influencing and dominating the most common affairs of the passing hour. It was one by one that to the eye of Paul this idea of the Divine headship was seen embracing the circles of everyday experience. He beheld it gradually descending from the height to the plain and from the plain to the valley, until it comprehended in the sweep of its downward movement the minutest and most trivial incidents in the life of the individual man.

How are we to trace the steps of this development? How shall we determine the order in which Paul realised the applications of this new idea of government? We have from his hands four epistles of the first captivity — those to the Philippians, Ephesians, Colossians, and Philemon. We cannot tell with any confidence in what order these were written, nor, if we could, would it much avail us. In whatever order they come, they are almost contemporaneous. The distance between them can be measured at most only by a few months. Between the earliest and the latest there does not intervene space enough to justify us in seeking in them stages of comparative development. We must abandon, therefore, any hope of tracing the order of Paul’s later stages by determining the sequence of these epistles. But there is another source of suggestion open to us. There is a peculiarity common to nearly all the writings of St. Paul. Each epistle consists of two parts — one doctrinal and the other practical, and the doctrinal invariably comes first. Why does the doctrinal come first? Why does the discussion of things in heaven precede the direction towards things on earth? Modern usage would certainly reverse the process. The inductive method of science has taught men to begin with matters of personal observation and thence to ascend to the theoretical and the abstract. But Paul was not a modern; he was a scion of the stock of Abraham, and he retained even in his Christianity the traditions of his nation. These traditions pointed in an exactly opposite direction to the modern method of induction; the Jew began with God and thence he descended to man. Moreover, as we have seen, Paul’s own development had been in this and not in the modern direction. His earliest vision had been a vision of the things above, not of the things on the earth; it was precisely here that his experience had been distinguished from the experience of contemporary apostles. Is it strange that the method of his life should have become the method of his thought? Is it strange that the steps of that order which he had described in his own experience should have become the steps of that order in which he beheld the unfolding of all things? His own spiritual history had been a progress from heaven to earth; was not the progress from heaven to earth the natural course in which he should realise the fulness of every doctrine?

Accordingly, in considering the development of the thought in these later epistles, we shall adopt this order which we have found in the mind of Paul him self. Wherever he speaks of Christ’s headship in its theological or abstract bearings, we shall assume that we are dealing with the thought in its earlier aspect, in that aspect in which it first presented itself to his mind. Wherever, on the other hand, he speaks of the headship of Christ in its earthly or human relations, wherever he deals with it in its reference to social or domestic problems, we shall take it for granted that the idea has presented itself to him in its later or more developed form. We shall thus preserve the analogy of that development which we have found everywhere else in the spiritual life of this apostle, and shall see him at the end, as we have seen him at the beginning, unfolding in the order of his thought, from the vision of Christianity on the height to the vision of Christianity in the vale.