Sunday, December 02, 2007
Sermons and Lessons
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Thomas Cuming Hall, Professor of Theology, Union Theological Seminary, New York, 1898-1929; born in Armagh, Ireland, September 25, 1858; graduated from Princeton, 1879; received degree of D.D. from Hamilton and Union Theological Seminary; was pastor in Omaha in 1883-86; in charge of the Forty-first Street Presbyterian, and later of the Fourth Presbyterian church, Chicago; author of “The Power of an Endless Life,” “The Social Significance of the Evangelical Revival in England,” “The Synoptic Gospels,” etc.
“For we through the Spirit wait for the hope of rightouness.“ - Gal. 5:5.
This letter marks Paul’s struggle with the older conservative forces from Jerusalem. These teachers from Jerusalem represented, it is quite true, an older stratum of thought than that of Paul. In the beginning all Christians had been Jews. The door¬way into the Christian Church had, in the beginning, been solely through Judaism. Jesus had been a faithful Jew, going to the synagogue, submitting to the ordinances of Judaism, taking his part in the regular services. He never broke with Judaism, only Judaism cast him out. These teachers from Jerusalem, therefore, felt that Paul was an innovator, and they had history on their side. But this was not their only difficulty; they also saw in Paul a great danger to the moral life of the community. This danger comes out strongly in the passage we have chosen. Paul was preaching as the central doctrine of Christianity faith energizing through love.
Now there is something to be said for these teachers from Jerusalem. Not only had they history on their side, but they had a very definite and concrete principle; and over against this principle Paul’s teaching seemed obscure and lazy. Paul spoke of faith energizing through love. He preached of liberty in Christ Jesus, of freedom in the Spirit. But who was to decide the limits of freedom, who could really separate between liberty and license? They felt that Paul himself was nebulous and hazy; he kept the Sabbath, but he taught his Galatian church they were not to keep the Sabbath. The council at Jerusalem had strictly prohibited eating meat offered to idols, but Paul said that when they went to the house of the heathen they could eat it, asking no questions. Paul kept vows and went up with shaven head to Jerusalem, but to the heathen church he taught freedom from vows and reliance solely upon an inner life. Over against this ambiguous teaching of Paul they could put definite, concrete law. They had the Old Testament, which Paul pretended also to honor; they had the council at Jerusalem, which Paul had also promised to obey; they knew exactly the limits of liberty and freedom, for it lay only within the definite closed system of the written law. Moses and the prophets and Jesus Christ, these were the ultimate authority, and all liberty that strayed beyond these was license and sin.
Moreover, these teachers of Jerusalem could actually point to the ill effects of Paul’s teaching. They had only to go to the church at Corinth and see in its confusions the evil effects of Paul’s principle of liberty. What was the good of singing a magnificent hymn to love to a people that could not even keep sober at the communion table? What was the good of painting in the most glowing colors the fruits of the spirit to a people practicing a form of incest abhorrent even to the heathen world? These teachers of Jerusalem felt that a great moral issue was involved; that Paul was breaking down the barriers that divided between the righteousness of the past and the licentiousness of the pagan community.
And in truth the law had functioned with extraordinary efficiency as a barrier between the Jewish world and the pagan corruptions. As one may see in East-Side streets in New York today, so in the Jewish community in the old Roman world, the legal arrangements isolated the Jewish community and gave to religious orthodoxy its one chance to stamp itself upon the youthful mind. They did not always succeed; they do not now always succeed; a large percentage broke away from law and were lost in the pagan tide, but a small minority always remained faithful and bore aloft the banner of righteousness according to Moses and the worship of Jehovah according to the ancient prophets. Why should not Christianity enter into this splendid Jewish heritage, preserve intact this wonderful isolation, and thus screen the Christian Church from the pagan world with equal effectiveness?
It is the old tragic struggle between law and authority, between the principle of life and progress and the timidity and natural fear that would seek to anchor itself in the past, to remain the same even if the whole world changed. And Paul saw more deeply into the real spirit of the struggle than did these teachers from Jerusalem. The letter to the Galatians and the letter to the Romans may be almost summed up in the words of our text: “We, through the Spirit, wait for the hope of righteousness.”
It is a tragic struggle because so much may be said on both sides. The past has had its triumphs, authority has yet its function; we are the children of the past; we have all been under authority. So largely has authority functioned in life that it must loom large on the horizon of us all; as children we obeyed our parents, as students we were under the authority of teachers; as citizens we feel that large sections of our life are under the authority of the community. We need the pressures of authority; who of us does not turn eagerly to the authority of the expert, feeling his own incompetence and glad in the last resort to trust to one more fully fitted? And authority is so definite brings with it a sense of peace; relieves us from the strain and struggle of our own decision, so that it is indeed a tragic moment when the boy or girl discovers that father and mother are not infallible, that the religious teacher makes mistakes even in morals, that the professor has already become antiquated, who once seemed so far in the van. Paul’s principle of liberty seems desperately dangerous in the presence of immaturity and the raw inexperience of the average human life. And yet, the question can never be actually put down—was Paul not right? Is his principle not the fundamental religious one.
True it is, that the teachers of Jerusalem, in a large way, won their battle. Paul’s principle was obscured, and unstable men wrested it to their own destruction. Much of the out¬ward form of Judaism disappeared; but the Church became another synagogue, the New Testament writings a simple addition to the law and the prophets, the fathers of the Church a new school of scribes, the creedal utterances a new mischna and a new interpretation of law. The irony of the situation is most plainly seen when we realize that poor Paul’s own writings became an addition to the law he dreaded.
His principle was never wholly lost sight of, in spite of the substantially authoritative character of Augustine’s system. Augustine at his best was profoundly Pauline, and there were voices of heretics all through the ages who raised again the cry of freedom. Yes, even within the Church men like Jovianus and Claudius stood strongly for the same freedom wherewith Christ had made us free. And at each religious revival men like Luther stood up to assert once more that we dare not identify our faith with even the fairest triumphs of the past; that if we were to be found faithful we, too, through the Spirit, must wait for the hope of righteousness, and that this faith, energizing by love, was more than law and larger and more effective than any tradition.
What is, then, the inwardness of this struggle? The essence of it is that which Paul clearly saw to be a contradiction between attitudes toward life where compromise is im¬possible; that this Galatian church had to choose between the teachers of Jerusalem and the teachings of Jesus Christ—and Paul was right. He had better understood Jesus than these teachers from Jerusalem, for Jesus had stood against all authority and defied it in the name and in the power of an inward assurance. “Ye have heard, Jesus said, bow they of old time said unto you, but I say unto you.” This Jesus taught as one having authority within; this Jesus broke the Sabbath day in the name of God and said the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath; this Jesus broke the Levitical law in the name of humanity and healed the sick, and let the hungry feed themselves on the Sabbath day in the assurance that he was Lord of the Sabbath. It was this defiance Of the outward law, it was this break with external authority, that cost the great innovator his life, and Paul felt, and felt rightly, that the cross of Christ was made vain and that the death of Jesus was bereft of significance if the faith of Jesus was buried again under the burdens of external enactment.
And history has been with Paul. All that he foresaw in writing to the Galatians took place, and all too speedily. Formalism, legalism, priestcraft and imperial ambition swallowed up the beautiful gospel of the Nazarene and left the church of the Middle Ages the merest caricature of Paul’s community of propaganda.
And when, after Luther, authority in the Puritan State again asserted itself to a lesser degree, all the evils against which the Reformation contended reasserted themselves — formalism, hypocrisy, sectarianism, dogged the steps of the Reformation Church. Protestantism took no part in the evangelization of the world into which Jesuitism threw itself. Protestantism failed to organize her forces on any principle larger than the broken fragments of scholastic creeds. Protestantism had to wait for the great evangelical revival before she again began to realize that her strength is the life of faith. and that we who are really Protestants through the Spirit must wait for the hope of righteousness; and that our principle is not law and external authority, but faith, and faith only, working by love.
It is this venture of faith that marks the movement of the modern religious world. The triumphs of the past are but the stepping-stones to the victories of the future. We must realize that the function of the past was principally as a training-ground for the freedom to make new and more glorious pasts. A really modern Protestantism stands firmly upon the same inward assurance that gave Paul his power of prophecy and which spoke the life-giving word in Jesus Christ.
But it may be said we are not Paul’s, and least of all are we to put ourselves on a level with Jesus Christ. This is fundamentally wrong. The faith of Paul is to be our faith; and tho we are not on a level with Jesus Christ, if we follow His leadership it is that we may, as He promised, become sons of God. Authority and law have only temporary place in the household of God, and Paul is right in interpreting Jesus as calling to us to become the sons of God and to enter into the freedom of sonship. It is a tremendous venture of faith; it involves, indeed, immense moral, intellectual, and spiritual risks, but it is the risk of the religious life; it is the inevitable outcome of the life of faith; it is because we believe in God that we, through the Spirit, wait for the hope of righteousness. Our faces are to the future. The past has its messages for us, but they are not final. The past had its triumphs, but they are only the foretaste of still larger victory. The past had its life, but to seek to go back to it is but to find it death. We wait for a hope of righteousness, the larger vision of new heavens and new earth, organized in the beauty of God’s holiness on the basis of loving faith, energizing effectively along all lines of life and in the tragic conflict between external authority and living faith, the great heroes of the past - Paul, Augustine, Origen - yes, even some of those who, like Gregory the Great and Leo the First, and the great Hildebrand, summon us to take part with the best in Luther and Calvin and Wesley in. building into the new world the triumphant faith that God is a living God and that we, through the Spirit, work and wait with Him for the coming, completer vision of righteousness, holiness and peace.
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Thomas Cuming Hall, Professor of Theology, Union Theological Seminary, New York, 1898-1929; born in Armagh, Ireland, September 25, 1858; graduated from Princeton, 1879; received degree of D.D. from Hamilton and Union Theological Seminary; was pastor in Omaha in 1883-86; in charge of the Forty-first Street Presbyterian, and later of the Fourth Presbyterian church, Chicago; author of “The Power of an Endless Life,” “The Social Significance of the Evangelical Revival in England,” “The Synoptic Gospels,” etc.
THE CHANGING AND THE CHANGELESS IN RELIGIOUS LIFE
“For we through the Spirit wait for the hope of rightouness.“ - Gal. 5:5.
This letter marks Paul’s struggle with the older conservative forces from Jerusalem. These teachers from Jerusalem represented, it is quite true, an older stratum of thought than that of Paul. In the beginning all Christians had been Jews. The door¬way into the Christian Church had, in the beginning, been solely through Judaism. Jesus had been a faithful Jew, going to the synagogue, submitting to the ordinances of Judaism, taking his part in the regular services. He never broke with Judaism, only Judaism cast him out. These teachers from Jerusalem, therefore, felt that Paul was an innovator, and they had history on their side. But this was not their only difficulty; they also saw in Paul a great danger to the moral life of the community. This danger comes out strongly in the passage we have chosen. Paul was preaching as the central doctrine of Christianity faith energizing through love.
Now there is something to be said for these teachers from Jerusalem. Not only had they history on their side, but they had a very definite and concrete principle; and over against this principle Paul’s teaching seemed obscure and lazy. Paul spoke of faith energizing through love. He preached of liberty in Christ Jesus, of freedom in the Spirit. But who was to decide the limits of freedom, who could really separate between liberty and license? They felt that Paul himself was nebulous and hazy; he kept the Sabbath, but he taught his Galatian church they were not to keep the Sabbath. The council at Jerusalem had strictly prohibited eating meat offered to idols, but Paul said that when they went to the house of the heathen they could eat it, asking no questions. Paul kept vows and went up with shaven head to Jerusalem, but to the heathen church he taught freedom from vows and reliance solely upon an inner life. Over against this ambiguous teaching of Paul they could put definite, concrete law. They had the Old Testament, which Paul pretended also to honor; they had the council at Jerusalem, which Paul had also promised to obey; they knew exactly the limits of liberty and freedom, for it lay only within the definite closed system of the written law. Moses and the prophets and Jesus Christ, these were the ultimate authority, and all liberty that strayed beyond these was license and sin.
Moreover, these teachers of Jerusalem could actually point to the ill effects of Paul’s teaching. They had only to go to the church at Corinth and see in its confusions the evil effects of Paul’s principle of liberty. What was the good of singing a magnificent hymn to love to a people that could not even keep sober at the communion table? What was the good of painting in the most glowing colors the fruits of the spirit to a people practicing a form of incest abhorrent even to the heathen world? These teachers of Jerusalem felt that a great moral issue was involved; that Paul was breaking down the barriers that divided between the righteousness of the past and the licentiousness of the pagan community.
And in truth the law had functioned with extraordinary efficiency as a barrier between the Jewish world and the pagan corruptions. As one may see in East-Side streets in New York today, so in the Jewish community in the old Roman world, the legal arrangements isolated the Jewish community and gave to religious orthodoxy its one chance to stamp itself upon the youthful mind. They did not always succeed; they do not now always succeed; a large percentage broke away from law and were lost in the pagan tide, but a small minority always remained faithful and bore aloft the banner of righteousness according to Moses and the worship of Jehovah according to the ancient prophets. Why should not Christianity enter into this splendid Jewish heritage, preserve intact this wonderful isolation, and thus screen the Christian Church from the pagan world with equal effectiveness?
It is the old tragic struggle between law and authority, between the principle of life and progress and the timidity and natural fear that would seek to anchor itself in the past, to remain the same even if the whole world changed. And Paul saw more deeply into the real spirit of the struggle than did these teachers from Jerusalem. The letter to the Galatians and the letter to the Romans may be almost summed up in the words of our text: “We, through the Spirit, wait for the hope of righteousness.”
It is a tragic struggle because so much may be said on both sides. The past has had its triumphs, authority has yet its function; we are the children of the past; we have all been under authority. So largely has authority functioned in life that it must loom large on the horizon of us all; as children we obeyed our parents, as students we were under the authority of teachers; as citizens we feel that large sections of our life are under the authority of the community. We need the pressures of authority; who of us does not turn eagerly to the authority of the expert, feeling his own incompetence and glad in the last resort to trust to one more fully fitted? And authority is so definite brings with it a sense of peace; relieves us from the strain and struggle of our own decision, so that it is indeed a tragic moment when the boy or girl discovers that father and mother are not infallible, that the religious teacher makes mistakes even in morals, that the professor has already become antiquated, who once seemed so far in the van. Paul’s principle of liberty seems desperately dangerous in the presence of immaturity and the raw inexperience of the average human life. And yet, the question can never be actually put down—was Paul not right? Is his principle not the fundamental religious one.
True it is, that the teachers of Jerusalem, in a large way, won their battle. Paul’s principle was obscured, and unstable men wrested it to their own destruction. Much of the out¬ward form of Judaism disappeared; but the Church became another synagogue, the New Testament writings a simple addition to the law and the prophets, the fathers of the Church a new school of scribes, the creedal utterances a new mischna and a new interpretation of law. The irony of the situation is most plainly seen when we realize that poor Paul’s own writings became an addition to the law he dreaded.
His principle was never wholly lost sight of, in spite of the substantially authoritative character of Augustine’s system. Augustine at his best was profoundly Pauline, and there were voices of heretics all through the ages who raised again the cry of freedom. Yes, even within the Church men like Jovianus and Claudius stood strongly for the same freedom wherewith Christ had made us free. And at each religious revival men like Luther stood up to assert once more that we dare not identify our faith with even the fairest triumphs of the past; that if we were to be found faithful we, too, through the Spirit, must wait for the hope of righteousness, and that this faith, energizing by love, was more than law and larger and more effective than any tradition.
What is, then, the inwardness of this struggle? The essence of it is that which Paul clearly saw to be a contradiction between attitudes toward life where compromise is im¬possible; that this Galatian church had to choose between the teachers of Jerusalem and the teachings of Jesus Christ—and Paul was right. He had better understood Jesus than these teachers from Jerusalem, for Jesus had stood against all authority and defied it in the name and in the power of an inward assurance. “Ye have heard, Jesus said, bow they of old time said unto you, but I say unto you.” This Jesus taught as one having authority within; this Jesus broke the Sabbath day in the name of God and said the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath; this Jesus broke the Levitical law in the name of humanity and healed the sick, and let the hungry feed themselves on the Sabbath day in the assurance that he was Lord of the Sabbath. It was this defiance Of the outward law, it was this break with external authority, that cost the great innovator his life, and Paul felt, and felt rightly, that the cross of Christ was made vain and that the death of Jesus was bereft of significance if the faith of Jesus was buried again under the burdens of external enactment.
And history has been with Paul. All that he foresaw in writing to the Galatians took place, and all too speedily. Formalism, legalism, priestcraft and imperial ambition swallowed up the beautiful gospel of the Nazarene and left the church of the Middle Ages the merest caricature of Paul’s community of propaganda.
And when, after Luther, authority in the Puritan State again asserted itself to a lesser degree, all the evils against which the Reformation contended reasserted themselves — formalism, hypocrisy, sectarianism, dogged the steps of the Reformation Church. Protestantism took no part in the evangelization of the world into which Jesuitism threw itself. Protestantism failed to organize her forces on any principle larger than the broken fragments of scholastic creeds. Protestantism had to wait for the great evangelical revival before she again began to realize that her strength is the life of faith. and that we who are really Protestants through the Spirit must wait for the hope of righteousness; and that our principle is not law and external authority, but faith, and faith only, working by love.
It is this venture of faith that marks the movement of the modern religious world. The triumphs of the past are but the stepping-stones to the victories of the future. We must realize that the function of the past was principally as a training-ground for the freedom to make new and more glorious pasts. A really modern Protestantism stands firmly upon the same inward assurance that gave Paul his power of prophecy and which spoke the life-giving word in Jesus Christ.
But it may be said we are not Paul’s, and least of all are we to put ourselves on a level with Jesus Christ. This is fundamentally wrong. The faith of Paul is to be our faith; and tho we are not on a level with Jesus Christ, if we follow His leadership it is that we may, as He promised, become sons of God. Authority and law have only temporary place in the household of God, and Paul is right in interpreting Jesus as calling to us to become the sons of God and to enter into the freedom of sonship. It is a tremendous venture of faith; it involves, indeed, immense moral, intellectual, and spiritual risks, but it is the risk of the religious life; it is the inevitable outcome of the life of faith; it is because we believe in God that we, through the Spirit, wait for the hope of righteousness. Our faces are to the future. The past has its messages for us, but they are not final. The past had its triumphs, but they are only the foretaste of still larger victory. The past had its life, but to seek to go back to it is but to find it death. We wait for a hope of righteousness, the larger vision of new heavens and new earth, organized in the beauty of God’s holiness on the basis of loving faith, energizing effectively along all lines of life and in the tragic conflict between external authority and living faith, the great heroes of the past - Paul, Augustine, Origen - yes, even some of those who, like Gregory the Great and Leo the First, and the great Hildebrand, summon us to take part with the best in Luther and Calvin and Wesley in. building into the new world the triumphant faith that God is a living God and that we, through the Spirit, work and wait with Him for the coming, completer vision of righteousness, holiness and peace.
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