Paul and the Family

A MAN’S theory of the universe is the key-note to his estimate of family relations. Whatever he has conceived to be the order of universal life becomes to him the pattern and model after which he would like to frame the circle of his own home. It was impossible that Paul could have passed through the development indicated in the previous chapter with out experiencing an essential change in his attitude towards everyday life. It was inevitable that the new view which Christianity had given him of the universe should transform his old view of the family and the home. We have seen that his Christian conception of the universe had been a direct revolt from his Jewish conception; I now go on to show that his Christian conception of the family was also a direct revolt from that conception of the family which was entertained by his nation.

The highest ideal of the Jewish mind was kinghood. It was an ideal which had its beginning in the sphere of religion; it did not ascend from earth to heaven but it descended from heaven to earth. The Jew’s first admiration of kinghood was derived from the contemplation of the universe. He looked upon the face of nature and beheld there the impress of power. The objects which excited his wonder, the objects which stimulated his inspiration, were the physical forces which manifest themselves in dynamical strength. His very first conception of Divine action in the universe was the conception of a rushing mighty wind moving on the face of the waters,1 and bearing down all opposition to its will. From this time forth the attribute which, above all others, he beheld in Deity was power. When he thought of God he thought of Him as, beyond every thing else, king. If he placed Him in solitary majesty, he did so in vindication of His kinghood. He wanted to think of Him as the Absolute Ruler, and, to assist that thought, he refused to allow Him any second in command; he placed Him apart from all other intelligences that he might express the fact of His regal independence. The watchword of his whole theological system was “the kingdom of God.”

Now this was the thought which in the history of the Jewish nation was brought down from heaven to earth. It was impossible it should exist in the air without in time descending to the plain, impossible it should be an article of theology without becoming also an article of social morals. That ideal of empire which the Jew saw in the heavens he began ere long to see on the earth. It was inevitable that he should fashion the things on the plain after the pattern of the things on the mount. Accordingly, it

i Gen. 1. 2.

is not long before we find him transferring his ideas of Divine sovereignty into the sphere of everyday life. The central sphere of his everyday life was the home circle. It was here, therefore, that the Jew first transplanted that ideal of imperialism which he had found in the outward universe. The Old Testament tells us in so many words that the Hebrew’s ideal of the home circle was modelled after the pattern of what he had seen in physical nature. Abraham stands below the stars and is impressed with their vastness and their innumerableness, and the vision suggests to him the possibility of founding a family which should represent in its numbers and its ramifications this exhaustless spectacle of the heavens. “So shall thy seed be,” is the ideal of family life which floats before his mind — an ideal whose essence is imperialism and whose glory is the acquisition of power. From the days of Abraham onward, the home circle becomes to the Jew the central image of that sovereignty which he had seen mirrored in the heavens. Forbidden to make any graven image of the Divine power, he substituted one which was not graven. He took the family as the representative in miniature of that form of empire which he had figured in the universe. The two ideas for which the family lived were multiplication and ramification. The life of the individual had little personal significance; it was but a tributary to the family life. The very thought of personal immortality was held in abeyance. The immortality which was flashed before the eyes of the individual soul was the perpetuated life of the nation through the growth and expansion of the family life. Hence the agency which above all others was recognised and valued was marriage. I do not know of any incident of the Old Testament more significant than the story of Jcphtliak’s daughter. That a father should sacrifice the life of his child in obedience to a religious vow is itself startling enough, but we are more startled still to be told that the main source of the lamentation was the fact of the maiden’s virginity. Yet the picture is true to the life of the nation. The individual existed only for the sake of the matrimonial tic, and the matrimonial tie existed only for the sake of posterity. That one should become a thousand, that the unit should expand into the multitude, was the object for which every life was born and the goal to which every life aspired.

And the result was one of the greatest disasters which can befall any nation — the depression and degradation of womanhood. I say depression and degradation, because there is evidence that the spirit of the Hebrew race was originally turned in an opposite direction. The earlier books of the Old Testament give ample indication that the original ideal of womanhood was higher than the subsequent ideal. The paradisiac state was figured as a state in which the sexes were of equal dignity, in which the woman was bone of the man’s bone and flesh of the man’s flesh. The first years of the people’s history exhibit an occasional respect for woman which can only be accounted for as the survival of mi earlier culture. Sarah triumphs in the house of

Abraham; Rebekah is unrivalled in the house of Isaac; Rachel and Leah, notwithstanding the broken monogamy, preserve the home features in the house of Jacob; Miriam sings in the desert, and Deborah leads the van on the other side of Jordan. Yet, all the time, the cloud is deepening, and the cloud is the worship of physical power. As the hope of empire draws nearer, as the tribe begins to expand into a nation and the nation begins to realise its definite destiny, the utilitarian value of marriage extinguishes its sacramental value, and woman, just in proportion as she absorbs attention in the sphere of numerical development, becomes a nonentity and a cipher in every other sphere.

By-and-by the national dream is broken. There comes a period of great depression in which the glory of the kingdom passes away and the hope of numerical greatness perishes; it is the age of the captivity. Yet, just as the old hope expires, a new hope appears. As Judea loses the prospect of reaching imperial greatness through the multiplication of her people she receives the prospect of becoming great through the appearance of a single man. The expectation that from the lineage of David there should arise a great political ruler to restore the fortunes of Israel did not begin with the captivity; but the captivity made it to every man a possible object of ambition to be come the parent of such a king. As long as the line of David was visibly distinguishable from other lines that ambition was limited to royalty. But when the storm came that laid the nation low, it tore off the branches of the Davidic tree and scattered them far and wide. It made them indistinguishable from the branches of other trees; it levelled them with the life of the common dust. And by that very act it widened their influence. Hitherto, the hope of being an ancestor of the political Messiah could only be shared by the royal house; but, when the branches of the royal house became untraceable, that hope became possible to all. Who could tell at what moment he might be brought into family relationship with the root of Jesse? Who could tell what matrimonial connection might in an instant unite him with that tree of national life from which prophets had predicted that the mighty branch should come? And so, at the very moment when the fortunes of Israel were most depressed, nay, by the very reason of their extreme depression, the utilitarian value of the marriage state acquired a new significance and a fresh power. I cannot say that, so far as the domestic altar was concerned, the new attractive force was one whit more salutary than the old. In the new, as in the old, the woman was simply a piece of mechanism set up to work out a political end. She was merely an instrument of state machinery designed to achieve a purpose external to her own destiny. She was an agency to accelerate the coming of a kingdom which, when it did come, would be foreign to her mission and alien to her capacity — a kingdom whose force was physical, whose strength was corporeal, whose aim was drastic, and whose method was crushing. She was appointed to spin a web by whose completion she must die. I have dwelt at some length on this feature of

Jewish home life because it may help to explain a matter in Paul’s Christian attitude on which there has been frequent misapprehension. When Paul embraced Christianity he passed out of sympathy with the family life of his nation. His departure, indeed, from the national ideal of the family is the earliest moral feature of his separation from Judaism. No one can read the seventh chapter of 1st Corinthians without being impressed with the fact that his attitude towards marriage was at that time, to say the least, non-sympathetic. The most he could say in its advocacy was to regard it as a shield against possible evils which might arise in its absence. But there has been considerable misconception as to the motive of Paul’s coldness in this matter. For one thing, it has been frequently averred that his want of sympathy for the marriage state originated in his general depreciation of womanhood. A more ungrounded assertion is not to be conceived. One of the most distinctive elements in Paul’s Christian experience was the recognition of the claims of woman; in nothing is he more sharply distinguished from his Jewish countrymen. Even those passages in which he seems to depreciate are dictated by a precisely opposite motive — the desire to conserve for woman that distinctive and peculiar sphere of which Jewish politics had deprived her. When he deprecates the notion that a woman should teach in the public assemblies,1 he does so on the ground that teaching in the public assemblies is not her sphere but inimical to her

i 1 Cor. xiv. 34, 35.

sphere. The sphere which he desires to conserve for her, or rather to create for her, is ministration. He looks upon it as her true province, nay, as her true power, to be a helper rather than an originator. The origination of action belongs in his view to the man; the reception and transmission of action is the gift of the woman. What else than this does he mean when he says, “For this cause ought the woman to have power on her head because of the angels”?1 The power on the head is of course a veil; but the very expression lifts the symbol into a thought. That which to the man would be a covering is to the woman declared to be a power. Her capacity of stooping to the will of others, her susceptibility of bending to the needs of those around her, if it separates her sharply from the man, is said to ally her with a greater than the man — the angel. To Paul, as to the writer of the epistle to the Hebrews, the name of angel is synonymous with that of ministering spirit. In linking the mission of the woman with the mission of the angel he is paying her the highest of all compliments, and he is paying her the compliment in that very direction in which she had been contemned. Her veil is declared to be her power. The ministrant element which Judaism had suppressed is to be made by Christianity her glory. Christianity is to Paul above all things a feminine strength. Its masculine features are recognised as mutable and perishable: prophecies we’re to fail, tongues were to cease, knowledge was to vanish away; but the strength that seeketh not her

i 1 Cor. xi. 10.

own, that suffereth long and is kind, that is not easily provoked, that vaunteth not herself, that beareth, believeth, hopeth and endureth all things, this was to be the permanent essence, the abiding power of the new evangel.

We cannot, then, account for Paul’s neutral attitude towards the married state by any theory of his depreciation of womanhood. We are bound to racognise the fact that his neutral attitude exists side by side with a recognition of the claims of woman which had not been made for centuries. There is another ground to which we are unable to refer Paul’s coldness towacds the matrimonial state. It is sometimes said that he was influenced in this direction by the belief that it was one of the things which Christ’s second coming would dissolve. Why, then, on the same principle does he not advise the discontinuance of the Lord’s Supper? Nothing can be more certain than that he regarded the Lord’s Supper as a provisional institution destined to pass away. Why, then, does he not speak of this institution in the form in which he speaks of marriage — as something which may be conveniently disregarded by those who have reached a larger light? He certainly does not so speak of it. He looks upon it as an ordinance which must last as long as the world lasts, which can only end when the dawn has already melted into the day. It is to be an institution in whose observance there is to be no break, in whose continuity there is to be no pause, in whose solemnity there is to be no suspension, until the

i I Cor. xiil.

shadow shall dissolve into the substance and the type shall be lost in its fulfilment, as often as ye eat this bread, ye do show the Lord’s death till He comes.” l What is that difference between these two cases which has necessitated on the part of the apostle such opposite modes of treatment?

In the answer to this question lies the solution of the whole problem. And the answer is not far to seek. The Lord’s Supper, fleeting as it was conceived to be, was still in Paul’s sight a sacrament; the ordinance of marriage, as Paul had hitherto known it, was not a sacrament. Remember where he had come from — from the camp of the Philistines. Reme’mber what in that camp the matrimonial tie had been — a bond of purely utilitarian value connecting human souls on the ground of expediency and uniting them for purposes extraneous to the domestic life. Remember, above all, that on the mind of the apostle there had not yet broken the full sweep of the sacramental light. He had not yet awakened to the truth of Christ’s secular priesthood. He had not yet realised the fact that there was an outer as well as an inner membership in the body of Christ, and that He could not be the sacrificial head of the Church without being the sacrificial head of the world too. He was still waiting for that final revelation which only came to him in the Roman captivity — the revelation that the secular sphere mirrored everywhere the law of the sacred, and that the symbol of the Lord’s Supper in the Church was reflected on the waters of outward life. Secular and sacred

J 1 Cor. xl. 26.

were as yet two spheres to him, and between heaven and earth there ran a line of the sharpest separation. Is it surprising that in this middle period of his history — the period in which Divine grace stood out in hold antithesis to the existing life of nature, he should have looked with a feeling akin to coldness upon an institution whose only recognised function had hitherto been the perpetuation of that life?

But now the scene changes. We pass over a brief period of five years, and we are ushered into a new world of Paul’s experience. The transition from Corinth into Rome is to him more than the transition from freedom into bondage; it is the passage from partialness into fulness of view. His vision of Divine truth at Corinth had partaken somewhat of the manner of Greece. Just as the Greek beheld the Divine influence only where he beheld the human beauty, so Paul in the Corinthian stage of his history had recognised the sacramental headship only where he saw the union of the ecclesiastical members. But when Paul reached Rome he began to see after the manner of Rome. The kingdom of God to him took that form which the kingdom of Caesar assumed to the Latin race — the form of a membership which was connected with all other memberships. As the image of the heavenly sunshine glitters in the earthly stream, even so in the institutions of the Roman empire did Paul behold a possible reflection of the sacrificial priesthood of Christ. I say, l a possible reflection.” The institutions of that empire were very far from exhibiting actually any such spectacle. Nevertheless, the moment that to the eye of Paul the world of time revealed itself as the possible mirror of eternity, the world of time in his eyes became sanctified, glorified. Its possibility became to him its only reality. Its present reality was a fiction, an illusion, a dream. That for which it lived was its golden future, and in the light of that future its value was to be measured. To Paul in the Roman dungeon the secular world shone with an ideal light. What the citizens of the empire beheld merely as a coin bearing the superscription of Caesar was reflected to his gaze with the stamp and impress of the Son of man. Instead of contemplating, as in days of yore, the dissolution of its life, he began to contemplate the Christianising of its life. Every form, every institution, became in his sight consecrated to a coming baptism — a baptism in which the membership of the Lord’s Supper was to become the type and symbol after whose pattern all other member ships were to be modelled, and in whose sacred likeness all secular things were to appear.

Amongst those secular things which Paul saw transfigured in the light of Christ, stood in the fore most rank the relations of the family circle. Next to the big universe of nature came to his sight the little world of home. We have seen in the previous chapter how, in the thought of Christ’s secular headship the universe of nature was transformed; we are now to see how in the same thought the idea of marriage became transfigured. That it did pass through such a transfiguration it seems to me im possible to deny. Let any man read the seventh chapter of 1st Corinthians, and turn afterwards to

Paul and the Family. 24T

the later epistles, he will, I am convinced, be impressed with the thought that in relation to the ordinance of marriage he is in a different atmosphere. It is not merely that in these later epistles the apostle has ceased to warn mankind of matrimonial dangers; this would be simply an argument from silence, which is the most inconclusive of all arguments. But the point which impresses me in these epistles is not so much the change in adverse criticism as the change in the mode of commendation. He had all along maintained the lawfulness of the matrimonial state; he had in certain cases asserted its expediency. But at the stage of the Roman captivity marriage has become to him not only in some cases expedient, but in every case sacramental. Its negative merit has been exchanged for a positive glory. It had all along the virtue of a shield to ward off greater dangers; it is now invested with a virtue on its own account. It has become in Paul’s sight the shadow and the type on earth of that which he regarded as the central fact of heaven — the union between the Christ of love and the Church which He had purchased with His blood.

Take in illustration that passage which has become typical of the Pauline view of marriage and authoritative as the rule of Christian observance — Ephesians v. 22 and sequel. When we read the opening words, “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord,” our first impression is that we are only listening to one of the many assertions by which Eastern despotism proclaims the authority of the male over the female. But, as we read on, our view is entirely altered. We find that the meaning given to the word submission is no longer Eastern nor even Roman. When we are told that the husband is the head of the wife, “even as Christ is the head of the Church and the saviour of the body,” we are confronted not by an intensification but by a limitation of marital authority. Remember what to Paul the headship of Christ is; it is in the most literal sense the saving of the body. It is a reign no doubt over the members, but it is not a reign after the analogy of kinghood. It is in its deepest essence a priesthood of suffering. It is a mastership over the members which is reached by taking their pains, a pre-eminence which is achieved by accepting the lowest room. It is this and nothing else than this that Paul recognises as the ideal type of marital authority. He offers it to the Gentile world as the extreme opposite of Eastern despotism. Preserving in words the ancient relation, it is yet in reality the reversal of that relation. As long as the husband was the king, the life of the wife was subservient to his own; but when he became the head, his own life became subservient. That this is Paul’s view, it is from the passage before us impossible to doubt. u Husbands, love your wives,” he says, “even as Christ also loved the Church, and gave Himself for it.” For almost the first time in the history of the world the man in the matrimonial contract stands forth as the sacrificial party — sacrificial by reason of his ihanhood, subservient on account of his headship. He is to the members of the household what Christ is to the members of the Church — the centre of all the nerves and therefore the bearer of all the pain. I say, “almost for the first time,” for here again Paul preserves his conservatism even amidst his progress; he claims to have a foothold in the past. As he had reached his conception of faith by going back beyond Judaism, he reaches his conception of marriage by going back beyond Hebraism. His eye rests on the picture of that primeval paradise where the nuptial torch of sacrifice was originally carried by the male, where it was not the woman that left father and mother to cleave unto the man, but the man who left father and mother to cleave unto his wife. He feels that if woman was to be exalted, emancipated, delivered from her life of bondage, it could only be by transforming the ideal of the husband into her own likeness, by making manhood itself a feminine power, by transferring to the function of empire that thought of ministration which had hitherto been regarded as the badge of the slave.

And truly Paul was right; the facts of the future have confirmed and justified his view. The history of modern times as distinguished from ancient times is the history of domestic life as distinguished from merely national life. The greatest gift of Christianity to the social fabric is the development of the idea of home. Here, for the first time, the life of the family stands forth without reference to political institutions, and for its own sake alone. Here, for the first time, the refinements and amenities of the domestic altar are cultivated for no utilitarian object, but simply for appreciation of their own beauty and

1 Eph. v. 31.

joy. Every step of this development is contemporaneous with the steps of that progress by which the woman rises in the social scale. Just in proportion as she becomes an authority in the family circle does the family circle itself become a centre of national life. The Roman empire did not pass away until it had taken the initiative in transferring the education of the child from the hands of the father into the hands of the mother. The process was long and devious but it has been worth the pains; it has imposed upon the Western world that influence of female culture which the Zenana Mission seeks to impose upon the East. Yet, if we ask what has been the ultimate source of this refinement in the idea of home, we shall be obliged to confess that the amelioration of woman herself has been rather an effect than a cause. We shall be compelled to recognise the fact that the change has its root in a more radical movement still — a movement which transformed not the female but the male, and which exerted its earliest influence rather on the husband than on the wife. We shall find that Paul has himself struck the key-note of the new evangel by placing the Christianised glory of marriage in the transformation effected on the very idea of empire. In recognising the truth that in the new regime the husband is head of the wife, “as Christ is head of the Church,” he has put his hand upon the real source of that refining influence which has produced the elevation of woman and created the

1 Even the fifth commandment is based upon a political ground, and is besides one-sided; contrast the reciprocal relation in Col. iii. 20, 21.

atmosphere of home. He has directed attention to the fact that Christianity has planted a feminine influence in the family circle mainly because it is itself a feminine power, has changed the position of the woman by altering the character of the man. He has revealed as the ultimate ground of this modern development that change in the idea of dominion which has substituted the head of a body for the king of a state and has identified the rod of empire with the badge of service. In proclaiming Christ as the idea of imperial as well as of ecclesiastical power he has himself been the pioneer of that civilisation which is essentially modern and distinctively Christian.