A commentary on the Greek text of the Epistles of Paul to the Thessalonians

Front matter

FROM REVIEWS OF THE FIRST EDITION.

"Those who have read Dr. Inge's previously published works, or have had the good fortune to hear him in the pulpit, will give a special welcome to a book bearing his name on the title-page. They will expect to be brought by reading it into contact with a mind of marked individuality, actively engaged in thinking out for itself the problems with which it chooses to deal, sensitively responsive to the currents of thought which move around it, and, moreover, gifted with a rare power of expressing what has to be said in language always dignified and often eloquent. Nor will they be disappointed in the present case." — Church Quarterly Review.

' ' This volume contains a great deal that is of real interest and value, and is likely to be especially helpful to preachers, as giving them fresh materials for thought."— Guardian.

Preface

volume contains a collection of sermons preached at various times and places, and not written with a view to publication. To claim that there is complete uniformity of thought between the earliest and the latest, would be to confess that the writer had learned nothing between the ages of thirty and forty. There are a few sentences in the earlier sermons which he would now express somewhat differ ently ; but he has thought it better not to alter any discourse from the form in which it was actually delivered. This principle has also compelled him to allow certain quotations to appear twice or even three times in the volume. He hopes, however, that sufficient variety of subject and treatment will be found in it to prevent these small repetitious from being tiresome.

Two of the sermons have appeared in the iSTew York Churchman, the editor of which has courteously consented to their being republished. Others have vi PREFACE

been reported at length in various newspapers. Obligations to other writers are less easy to remember and acknowledge. The sermon on The Mirror of Truth (XII.) is partly based on an address by Arch bishop Benson, given at a retreat for Public School masters, which made a deep impression on all who heard it. In the address on the Theologia Germanica (XIX.) some use has been made of Miss Winkworth's translation. The last sermon (XX.) led to some corre spondence in the Guardian and Church Times, in consequence of the allusion to a pamphlet by Mr. Lacey and Lord Halifax, entitled Harnack and Loisy, Mr. Lacey maintaining that the quotations in the sermon did not fairly represent his position.

The title, Faith and Knowledge, was chosen to indicate the main subject of several of the sermons. The writer, it will be seen, has not much sympathy with the Wunsch-philosophie which is now so popular among Christian apelogists. He regrets the tendency to degrade the reflective reason to the position of a mere advocate retained by the will, and disagrees with the dictum of Lotze, that " we strive to know only in order that we may learn what to do." " Prag matism," as this view of things is now commonly called, is the philosophy of those who base their religious faith on the extreme conclusions of scepti cism. It lends itself too easily to a formal orthodoxy

PREFACE vii

which is only at peace because it is no longer any where in contact with fact. The writer of these sermons believes that to make the intellect the obedient servant of the will is to invert the normal course of spiritual progress, which is from faith to knowledge, or (as the mystics say) through discipline to enlightenment. The deepening of faith by personal experience leads naturally to a progressive diminution in the tension between faith and knowledge. The apparently irreconcilable conflict between naturalism and supernaturalism is resolved in a more spiritual and less childish view of God and Nature. When Faith can walk alone, Knowledge takes away her crutches. Eternal life, according to St. John, is the process of knowing God and Christ, an infinite ascent in knowledge of the Infinite. There must, then, be no acquiescence in irrational or unscientific beliefs ; if our faith finds them a necessary support, it is because our faith is still weak. Goethe's maxim is very true, that " whatever frees our spirit without giving us control over ourselves is ruinous " ; but the Christian, who begins with self-discipline, may expect to find " freedom of spirit " coming to him without danger.

In the writer's opinion, two things are now most necessary, if the Church is to take her proper place in the life and thought of the twentieth century. One is, that her teachers should steadily discourage the viii PREFACE

popular supernaturalistic dualism — the notion that God only begins where nature leaves off, and works with a free hand only in the ever-narrowing gaps which science has not yet filled up. And the other — a positive precept — is that many competent workers should devote themselves to a rigidly scientific study of the normal phenomena of religious experience.

HERTFORD COLLEGE, OXFORD, April 1904.

Contents

SERMON PAGE

I. THE RISEN CHRIST.

St. Paul's Cathedral, Easter Day, 1892. . . 1

I. The Risen Christ

" I am He that liveth, and was dead ; and, behold, I am alive for evermore."— REV, i. 18.

I.

THE RISEN CHRIST.

TIST a few hours the great festival day of 'our religion will have passed by once more. To the large majority, no doubt, it will have passed without awakening emotions of any kind. It is not easy for most people to feel the anniversaries of the Church. Sluggishness of imagination, habitual secularity of thought and habit, absorption in the present or the future, combine to make men's hearts cold when the Church calls them to stand before the cradle at Bethlehem, the Cross on Calvary, or the empty tomb in Joseph's garden. Yet many there are, I doubt not, who, as they knelt at the altar this morning, were filled with a measure of the same joy with which the disciples " were glad when they saw the Lord " once more in the midst of them ; who had waited for this Easter morning as people sometimes watch for the sun to rise from the sea, that they may mark for once the progress of that daily miracle which floods the world with light and life. For them the risen Christ is indeed the Sun of their existence, and therefore it is without any effort or strain that they welcome their Easters as they return, and say with all sincerity, " This is the day which the Lord hath made ; we will rejoice and be glad in it." It is not to such that I offer my words this evening. They need no homilies to help them to keep Easter fitly. Enough for them to join in the majestic anthem which celebrates the event of the day, and " to keep the feast with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth." Nor do I address myself to those, if there be any such here, who care for none of these things, who let even Holy Week and Easter pass without a thought of their Eedeemer, and of the immeasurable importance of the events which we are now com memorating. Bather I speak to those who wish to join in the Church's songs of triumph — who perhaps in former days sang their Easter hymns with no feigned exultation, but who feel now that their sky is overcast ; that their thanksgivings are cold, perhaps almost insincere ; that a painful though inarticulate misgiving troubles their hearts, and threatens to turn their joy into sorrow. They long to see their risen Lord, as they perhaps saw Him in former years ; but their eyes are holden, they see Him not ; and so, like Mary Magdalene, they stand without at the sepulchre weeping. Am I wrong in supposing that there are probably some such in this building ? Alas ! no : the atmosphere of the world is about us all ; few of us escape its influence. There are few who do not know what it is to sigh before the empty tomb, " because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid Him."

Let not those who never felt a doubt be angry with their brothers who stand weeping at the sepulchre. They would not stand there if their hearts were not right with God. Their vigil may yet end in an angel's visit. Reserve your indignation for those to whom unbelief comes as an emancipation, who rejoice to quench the smoking embers of their faith, who love darkness and hate the light, because their deeds are evil.

But for those whose Easter happiness has been marred by the fear that their faith is slipping from them, it may be worth while to consider very briefly what the evidence for this central fact of Christianity is. If we want to judge whether any event happened or not, we ask two questions, Is it well attested ? and, Is it probable in itself ? The resurrection of Christ is as well attested as most facts in history. It is witnessed by the apostles, who were men, not of the lowest, but of the more independent trading class, — the class from which our juries are taken by preference, who may be generally trusted to show matter of fact common sense, and who are not likely to be misled by romance or morbid excitability. They are very good witnesses, — better, perhaps, than more highly educated men. Since, then, the apostles all believed that they had seen Christ alive after His death (for I think we need not discuss the theory that they were impostors), we may surely say that the evidence is good enough to establish any fact not intrinsically very improbable. This, then, is the real point. Is the resurrection so improbable that no evidence is sufficient to prove it ? We know that some think that it is, while others are convinced that it is not. Why is there this difference of opinion ? Mainly because some think of the resurrection as an isolated and unparalleled portent ; while to others it is the explanation of a living fact, which is confirmed by experience and observation. The Christian believes that Jesus Christ rose, largely because he sees and feels that He is risen. Jesus is Himself the resurrection and the life, and the risen life — the Christian life, which St. Paul says is " vain " if Christ be not risen — has not been vain : it has left its mark unmistakably and indelibly on the world as the strongest and noblest thing on this earth. Doctrines, like characters, are known by their fruits ; and to suppose that such lives as those of St. Paul, St. Francis, General Gordon — and let us think, too, of the best women and men we have known — were formed by a delusion, is surely a very wantonness of scepticism. The gospel narrative furnishes the most natural explanation of phenomena which we see around and within us. It fits into its place in history. Even could we mistake the clear tokens of our Lord's gracious presence which He gives to all of us in our inner lives, can we fail to see, in the history of the Church, that its Head is not dead but alive, — alive to give it that marvellous recuperative power which has again and again inspired it with new supplies of faith and vigour, just when its enemies hoped that it was about to sink into the abyss ; alive, too, to impress

His own likeness on the characters of saints innumer able, whose goodness is not of this world, and whose lives, like that of Christ Himself, are inexplicable on any but the Christian hypothesis ? Such considera tions are a most powerful, indeed, I think, an indis pensable, support to the doctrine of the resurrection, showing as they do that that doctrine supplies the only key to explain facts which are before our eyes every day. And yet, powerful as these proofs are, we must not expect that they will authoritatively silence doubt. The gospel sign is addressed to faith, not to sight. God will not coerce us into His service either by cogency of external evidence or by startling spiritual experiences. It is not by the wind or the earthquake, but by the still small voice, that He speaks to us. We trace the same method in all parts of our Lord's manifestation of Himself. The annunciation was secret, the nativity was secret, the resurrection was secret, the ascension almost secret. One thing alone was public in the earthly life of the Lord of glory — His humiliation and death. Once, and once only, was He lifted up from the earth for all men to behold Him, — it was when He was nailed to the tree of scorn ; once only was the sign for which the Jews clamoured vouchsafed to them, — it was when the Cross was set on Calvary as " a sign which should be spoken against."

Can we doubt the significance of this ? God would be our Father, not our taskmaster. He demands of us the offering of a free heart, not the prudent hornage of calculating self-interest, or the reluctant service of slavish fear. It is His will that we should make a venture for His sake. Next to the incomparable definition of faith in the Epistle to the Hebrews, I know of none better than that of a living writer — " The resolution to stand or fall by the noblest hy pothesis." We must perforce stake much on evidence which does not amount to mathematical demonstration. Let those who are disposed to murmur at this ask themselves whether, in their best moments, they would really have it otherwise ? Should we be glad, in our best moments, to see the Divinity of Christ proved like a proposition in Euclid ? Should we wish to forfeit entirely the blessing on those who have not seen, and yet have believed ? the last beatitude of the gospel, as it has been fitly called. For in what way can poor mortals show love to an omnipotent Being ? In one way only — when He condescends to ask us to trust Him. Then, indeed, we may do some thing to show our love. We are glad, are we not, of an opportunity of risking something for those whose affection we wish to win, and to whom we wish to prove our own love ? So, when our dear Lord, who has deigned to call us His friends, asks us to trust His promise, solemnly given and often repeated, shall we demand that He shall give us a bond, as people do when they do not trust one another ?

The doctrines of our Lord's Divinity, of His resurrection from the dead, of His abiding presence in His Church, rest on the most explicit declarations and promises of our "Lord Himself — " I and My Father are one " ; "I am the resurrection and the life " ; " Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world." Can we doubt that these words were spoken, that these promises were made ? Or are we afraid that, having been made, they will be broken ? The latter alter native we cannot consent to discuss. We know Him in whom we have believed, — know Him at least so far as to be sure that He is no deceiver. Eight gladly do we accept His promises ; and right glad are we too, in our heart of hearts, that they are promises and not bonds. The idea of religion as a series of propositions to be examined by the rules of evidence has no place in the spiritual history of the real saint. The weapon has broken like ill-attempered steel whenever it has been used, as it was used far too much by the apologists of the last century. It is not God's will that the start should be made from calculation. It is not the power, but the love of Christ, which " constraineth us." To that gentle but strong constraint \ve are to yield our selves, — to take our stand on His side, because we love and adore His perfect character ; because, come what will, it were better to try to be like Him while we live here, than to be the servants of any other master. This great act of our whole moral nature — this deter mination to trust in Christ, and to follow Him whither soever He leads — is called by St. Paul " rising with Christ." Let no familiarity blunt the edge of this expression. It shows us how thoroughly the inspired writers felt that the resurrection was no detached io FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE

occurrence, but a living truth, which each of us has to realise, to appropriate, even to exemplify in his own life. And we soon find that the venture was justified. To those who are leading the risen life, faith becomes its own irrefragable evidence. As in climbing a mountain one rises by degrees above the mist and fog of the plain into bright sunshine and clear air, till the summit, hidden from below, comes into view against the blue sky ; so each advance in holiness dispels difficulties, solves contradictions, and brings us nearer to that supreme consummation in which all truths are reconciled. To that summit we shall not attain while we live here ; but the day assuredly will come when we shall no more see through a glass darkly, but shall behold Him face to face — our Lord who died for us ; and shall hear from His lips the words which John heard in his vision at Patmos — " I am He that liveth, and was dead ; and, behold, I am alive for evermore."

II. Hope And Fulfilment

" These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth." — HEB. xi. 13.

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II.

HOPE AND FULFILMENT.

TN the sublime chapter from which these words are taken, we find the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews giving a still further development and more extended application to one of the most far-reaching conceptions of St. Paul. The education of humanity through its hopes — hopes strictly unrealisable, but yet divinely implanted, and leading upward and onward to fuller knowledge and higher, purer aspirations, so that each disappointment was, as it were, but the unfurling of a new leaf of the mighty scroll on which God's purposes are written, — this idea is one which deeply penetrated the mind of St. Paul, and which supplied him with the key to the history of God's dealings with the Jewish people. This is the signifi cance of his oft-repeated word " mystery " in regard to the preparation of the gospel. The purpose of God for the redemption of mankind was predetermined before the foundation of the world ; but during the whole period of the old dispensation it was concealed, or only adumbrated in a manner which admitted wide misunderstandings of its scope. The clue could be traced backwards, after the final revelation had been made ; but during the preparatory process it was necessarily undiscerned even by the chosen instruments of its furtherance. The first Christians felt that very much was plain to them which had been obscure to their forefathers. They knew now, or learned it from St. Paul, that the Mosaic Law had been but a school master to bring the world to Christ ; that the sacrifices and temple-worship had had but a transitory and educa tional value — nay, that the collapse of the exclusive claims of the Jewish nation was the necessary condition of a universal gospel.

" Their fall," as St. Paul says (Eom. xi. 12), "was the riches of the world, and their loss the riches of the Gentiles." These were ideas which must have appeared revolutionary enough to the pious and patriotic Jew. But the transmutation of his hopes was not yet complete : a further trial awaited him. St. Paul and his contemporaries still cherished two expectations which were not destined to be literally fulfilled, and without which they would perhaps have hardly had the heart to fulfil the task laid upon them. In the first place, they confidently anticipated the return of Christ to earth within their own lifetime. No unbiassed reader of St. Paul's earlier Epistles can have the slightest doubt either of the fact of this belief, or of the very important part which it played in the earlier Christian mission-teaching. It was much easier to face the contumely of the world, and to glory in the offence of the Cross, while it was believed that the humiliation of Christ and the persecution of His disciples were to form but a brief episode, which might be terminated at any moment by the final triumph and vindication of the truth. This was the first illusion which animated the early Jewish teachers of the gospel. The second was, that the Jewish nation would ere long be brought to recognise Jesus as their promised Messiah. The Jewish converts had now to suffer the ban of their spiritual fathers ; they were put out of the synagogues where they still wished to worship ; they were condemned as impious by those whose office they still revered. But the time would soon come, they hoped, when their " heart's desire for Israel" would be fulfilled, and when the grievous rent which divided them from their brethren would be closed.

The generation of St. Paul passed away. One by one they fell asleep, only half consoled in their last moments by the assurance that on the approaching day of triumph their friends who survived them " should not prevent them " in meeting their Lord. And now men began to ask, " Where is the promise of His coming ? " Year after year passed, and still the Trapovaia was deferred. Nor could they any longer hope that the obstinate unbelief of their compatriots would ever yield ; instead of coming into the Church, Judaism became ever more bitterly estranged from it.

The Epistle to the Hebrews is written expressly to deal with these problems. The author, whoever he may be, was evidently a man of high intellectual power, and no novice in literature. In the copiousness of his vocabulary, and the artistic arrangement of his periods, no less than in the self-restraint and coherence of his arguments, we mark a great contrast to the impetuous pleadings of St. Paul. He was therefore well fitted for the task which the Holy Spirit guided him to undertake. That task was, we may almost venture to say, to show the province of illusion in the economy of grace. It was his office to kindle a new hope for Israel from the burnt out emblems of her national aspirations. " Lord, wilt Thou at this timo restore again the kingdom to Israel ? " This had been the longing hope of the apostles ; a hope which within the Church had created the belief in the approaching Trapova-ia and reign of Christ on earth. This hope had now faded ; and the argument of the Epistle to the Eomans needed to be restated in a more com prehensive form. No millennium on earth, it was now felt, was to vindicate the sovereign rights of the Son of David : the sons of the men who crucified the Lord might continue to ascribe their troubles to other causes. What then remained ? To show that the sufferings and death of Christ were themselves the victory over the world — that the Captain of our salvation, made perfect through suffering, has gone before us into no earthly kingdom. And the Jewish Christian, who feared that he was cut off from God's covenant, was bidden to take a comprehensive view of the whole course of history, going back, behind Moses and Aaron, to the records of primitive man. He would then see that the Mosaic covenant had been but an episode, having a beginning and an end ; its

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exclusiveness was no part of the permanent law of God. The Mosaic priesthood had played its part, and was now for ever abrogated : Christ was a merciful and gracious High Priest indeed ; but after the order of Melchizedek, not of Aaron. The sacrifices of the temple had all pointed to Christ — they had no mean ing else : all the symbolism of the Mosaic Law was summed up in His person, who was at once Priest, Altar, and Victim. On Christ, then, must the Jew fix his eyes : he will find that nothing is lost, though all is transformed. Jerusalem — the priesthood — the temple — the peculiar people — all are there ; but not as Moses planned and David sang.

It is thus that the inspired writer transmutes and spiritualises the tenacious longings of his countrymen. It is thus that his soaring faith gives a new substance to old hopes, and proclaims the reality of things not seen. From the earliest period of Jewish history he traces the operation of the guiding star of faithful hope. He tells how Abraham left his home to seek a country in which, as St. Stephen said, he received no inheritance, — no, not so much as to set his foot on, — but found the city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God. He names Moses, Joshua, Gideon, David, Samuel — the men who legislated, fought, prophesied for Israel : the men and women also who suffered for her, who " were stoned, were sawn asunder, were burnt (if that be the true reading), were slain with the sword ; who wandered in deserts and mountains, and caves and holes of the earth.

And all these, having had witness borne to them through their faith, received not the promise, God having provided some better thing concerning us." They received not the promise — none of them ; nor was the promise ever fulfilled in the way which they had pictured to themselves. God had " provided some better thing," which He gave us instead, as the fruit of their labours and sufferings. Was, then, their faith vain ? Were their lives wasted ? Nay, they were more than conquerors : their defeat was more than a victory. God was to them, as always, better than His promise : He gives not only more than we de serve, but more than we, in our ignorance, desire. The cloud of witnesses which compasses us about, the spirits of just men who have now entered in within the veil, complain no longer, if they ever did complain, that they have laboured for nought, and spent their strength in vain : with one voice they exhort us to take up the burden where they laid it down, and to run with patience the race that is set before us.

Such is the theme of this glorious Epistle. And is not the principle which it sets forth one of per petual validity ? If we let our eye run over the course of human history, or any fragment of it, from the apostolic age to our own, do we not find everywhere the same law of success in failure, failure in success ? Do we not find that great men and great movements have almost always achieved not what they in tended, but something different ? That the objects which the leaders of men have set before themselves have been often wild, impossible, mischievous, while the work which God willed them to do has been done unconsciously or reluctantly ? We think we can trace the finger of God in the history of the Christian Church, though we have no inspired guides to interpret it as the New Testament writers interpreted the Old Testament ; but how often on any view of Christian history have the saintliest characters misread the signs of the times, and resisted or grieved over tendencies which were full of promise for the future !

Or if, instead of surveying the broad fields of history, we fix our attention on the life of individuals as we know it, is it not a commonplace that man is the victim of illusions all his life ? Indeed, we cling to hope's flattering tales in a way which almost justifies the accusation of " unconquerable levity," which a great writer has brought against the human race. The hopefulness of youth is not damped by the warnings of disillusioned age, partly because the old love to join in day-dreaming for others, when they have ceased to do so for themselves, and try to forget their own experience. The mother, we are told, forgets her pain, in joy that a man is born into the world. But by the graveside our thoughts and our language are different. Our tears are for our selves, seldom for the dead ; we do not speak insin cerely when we thank God " for delivering our brother or sister from the miseries of this sinful world." Every New Year, in the same way, we celebrate with festivities and merry-making every old year we spurn away with a kind of contumely, as a guest that has outstayed his welcome.

Why is it that we cling thus to a hopefulness which cannot be seriously justified ? Putting aside the contemptuous answer of the cynic, whose attitude is not justifiable as a permanent frame of mind, there are two possible ways of facing the recognised illusiveness of life. The one is the way of the pessi mist, the other is the way of the Christian.