1 Corinthians 1:13

Party Spirit

1Co 1:13

How comprehensive were all the questions put by the Apostle Paul! How instinctively and therefore instantaneously he always went to the root of the matter! He knew nothing about evasion or double-dealing of any kind; he had no part or lot in anonymous insinuations or statements. We have seen that he gave up his authority for assuring the Corinthians that there were divisions and contentions of many kinds in that tumultuous Church. Now he draws the attention of the Church to the one all-determining inquiry, What is Christ's relation to the Church? Everything must stand or fall by the reply to that inquiry. One only wonders that this was a Church at all. That is the mystery of grace. This is a departure from our little mechanical prejudiced conceptions of a Church. We have seen what culture did for Greece, if Corinth may be taken as representing that classic land. Culture led away from God. Culture had its prayer; but in the streets of Corinth public, prayer was offered that the gods would increase the number of the prostitutes. Culture without humility, culture without a cross shadowing it, what is it but selfishness, vanity, idolatry? Yet Paul finds a Church here, calling it the Church of God. We are too pedantic in our classification. We should look at the manhood rather than at the mere circumstances limiting and qualifying it. The king is not named by any one appellation. Charles the First was not the king; the king was within him. He was still to be prayed for as the king. We look at his little doings, his mischief-makings, his vanities, ambitions, tergiversations, and grow eloquent in our condemnation about him. But all that has nothing to do with the king; the king is there, whether for the moment he be devil or angel; both these classifying terms must be dropped, and the term "king," royal and significant, must stand, whoever for the moment the man may be who debases the office. So with the Church of God; we must look at the ideal Church, at the thing signified. We are not the Church, else what a poor Church it were! Take out littleness and ignorance, our selfishness and vanity, our bigotry and self-idolatry, and how the enemy might make merry over us as the Church! How he might fling our prayers in our face, and echo our songs with a suggestive cadence! The fool would not be foolish only, but unjust. He does not know whereof he affirms. The Church of God is within; an invisible, spiritual, ideal germ: an outline shaped in clouds, and yet to be realised as it were in the granite and rocks of eternity. So the man is within the man. Say not you will judge the poor creature by his conduct, for then no gaol would be large enough to hold so much wickedness; then no asylum would be large enough to accommodate such overflowing and immeasurable imbecility. You do not see the man; only God sees him: he is better than he appears to be, if sometimes he is worse than the surface would enable us to conclude. So we repeat the sacred doctrine we have already ventured to lay down that God is judge: he knows whether we are his kings and priests and Church, or whether we are refuse and offal, living and hopeless offences.

Amongst the deprivations and general debasements of the Church at Corinth there was one which may be designated by the term Party Spirit "Every one of you saith, I am of Paul; and I of Apollos; and I of Cephas; and I of Christ." There were denominations within the denomination. Within an apparently united Church there were all kinds of sects, all degrees of animosity, all temperatures of virulence. Paul will not have this. He will at all events extricate himself from this prostitution of his name. Saying nothing of Apollos or Cephas, he says, "Was Paul crucified for you?" No man came so near to being crucified for the Church. How he approaches the Son of God! In self-surrender, in pious obliteration, how nearly he is on the very Cross of his Lord! Yet between Paul's crucifixion and Christ's there lies an infinite distance of significance. There can be but one Christ; his robe is seamless, his crown fits no other brow; he is the one Lord, he cannot be divided. Yet every day we are trying to divide him. Party spirit was not the blemish of Corinthian ecclesiastical society alone; party spirit is rife to-day. Party spirit is not truthful. A religious party man cannot speak the truth. When he is most vehement he is most perjured. Who can tell exactly what his opponent believes? and who can state in words, which his opponent would accept, his opponent's exact position? Or who, by some happy chance hitting upon the very words, can utter those words in the tone which an opponent would adopt and endorse? The party man need not intentionally tell lies; he simply can hardly help doing so. His prejudice beclouds his vision, his bias turns him away with a kind of significant haughtiness or revulsion from the man whom he is attempting to represent. We have heard a theologian declare that there is a band of men newly risen who declare that it is safe for men to die in their sins. This statement has been made by a man of celebrity, by a man of capacious and ardent mind. Now refer the statement to the parties implicated and say, Do you teach that it is safe for men to die in their sins? They redden with anger, they flush with indignant shame, that such a travesty of their views should have been perpetrated. Yet they are all honourable men. The accuser did not mean to falsify, but his prejudice was larger than his reason, his fury overwhelmed his temper, and he showed how dangerous a thing it is to pick out words for other men when the attempt is to express the deepest convictions of the soul. It is not safe for men to die in their sins; it is not safe for men to live in their sins; it is not safe for men to have any sympathetic relation to sin. How tremendous the blasphemy to insinuate that any Christian man could suppose that it was safe for men to die in their sins! If this calumny has not yet defiled our English communications, let us be grateful that we are separated from it at least by the width of the Atlantic. Party spirit is not sincere. This is the more notable because it appears to be awfully in earnest. Sincerity is a larger term than may at first be supposed; it involves and connotes many elements of judgment, honesty, sense of what is due to man, to truth, to God. It is possible to be sincere at one point, and to be there even burningly severe to be there even scorchingly earnest; but for want of a proper width and range of judgment it is possible also to lose the one burning point of sincerity. Distinguish between sincerity and bigotry. Sincerity should be large, should be calm, should be refined, should have the Divine power of patience, and the Divine attribute of hope. Madness may be a form of sincerity; it is not the less an expression of insanity and a guarantee of danger. Party spirit is not acceptable. It wounds the very Lord it attempts to serve. Jesus Christ will have nothing to do with our parties; he died for the world; he tasted death for every man, and he only knows the meaning of that all-involving expression "every man." We hastily pronounce the words, but he had eternity to think them over, and he has eternity in which to redeem his meaning when he bowed his head in death for every man. Our little impatience, our self-extinguishing, self-exhausting vehemence, our professed regard for truth at the expense of the larger human feeling, may be well-intentioned tributes, but he never allows them to be laid acceptably upon his altar. We have not a divided Christ; we have a united and indivisible Lord.

What is the explanation of difference? for difference is to be tolerated, and is to be recognised with thankfulness; only difference need not by any irresistible compulsion become party spirit. We have seen how the Apostle Paul maintained the right of diversity, gloried in diversity, showed how diversity and unity are perfectly compatible. What is the explanation of rational, healthy, useful difference? The explanation is that no man can see all the truth, and no one man can represent the totality of God's thought. We are all needed. The mischief is that we separate one testimony from another, and regard as an integer that which after all may be but the smallest of fractions. Peter read something that Paul had written, and he said, "These things are hard to be understood." Did he then expel Paul? Nay verily; for in the very confession that Paul had written some things hard to be understood, Peter described him as "our beloved brother Paul," that great, strange, sometimes almost unbalanced and wild mind, that genius that hovered near the eternal throne and snatched notes from angelic music, and came and told the Church with more or less of incoherence what he had seen and heard; Peter did not understand him; did not profess to stand shoulder to shoulder with that man, but he had grace enough to describe him as "our beloved brother Paul." Probably the Apostle Paul may have heard something of this, for when he comes to define his own ministry and function, he distinctly says, "my gospel." There is a sense in which that is true of every man. Each man has his own view of God, his own conception of truth and duty, his own little light of hope. These are incommunicable gifts. Man is put in trust of some individuality of faith; it is enough if in his stewardship he be found faithful. We should gain much if we could realise the fact that each man has what he may honestly and modestly denominate his own gospel; that is to say his own view of the Gospel, his own way of explaining the Gospel, his own delight in the Gospel; let each man speak out of his own consciousness and his own experience, and what is lacking in monotony will be made up in individuality; and individuality properly construed and regulated is the guarantee of spiritual energy in the Church.

The Apostle James will write a letter and will dwell upon works; he will have works done; he will have an industrious and self-attesting Church; he will demand every day an account of the acts of yesterday. John will follow James, and will write of love. Where, then, is the Church? In Peter? No. In Paul? No. In James? No. In John? No. Where is the Church? In all of them. The organ is not a flute or trombone, clarionet or bassoon. What is it? All of them; and more still, and all worked from a centre, and all inspired by a common knowledge, and all united in expressing lofty, martial, pensive, comforting, or rousing music. You have not heard the Gospel if you have only heard one man preach it. The Gospel is infinitely larger than any one man's little brain. We have only heard the Gospel when we have read all the Evangelists and all the Apostles. Otherwise only one writer would have been required to write the Bible. Moses, might have done it, or Ezekiel; Paul might have written the whole of the New Testament, or John; but God required the truth to be presented from every possible point of view, and each man comes into this great treasure-house to take out of it that which he most particularly needs for the moment. Is justification by faith? Yes. Is justification by works? Yes. Is predestination taught in the Bible? Yes. Is free will taught in the Bible? Certainly. You must study the proportion of faith; you must grasp the philosophy of revelation, and you must live and move and have your being in the Divine rhythm. You cannot snatch at heaven's prizes: you must live long before you begin to see how far away the horizon is, and yet what a wondrous part it plays in defining issue and boundary. Some minds can only be approached along doctrinal lines. You must come to them with philosophies, theologies, high speculations and debates. Blessed be God, such minds are few in number. Other minds could only be secured in sacred custody and imprisonment for Christ by proceeding along sympathetic lines. You come to them with offers to dry away the stains of sorrow, to bind up the broken heart, to make the grave tremble with immortality. Then you touch the heart, and fire the imagination, and excite the feelings with holy and rational ecstasy. Other minds can only be approached along what may be termed selfish lines. You must give them a good substantial heaven and hell to begin with; you must guarantee that they are going to heaven wherever anybody else is going to. Then they say, This is definite! So it is; it is extremely definite. The number of the selfish is large; they do not care for high reasoning, for noble sentiment, for broad and generous interpretation of things. They want to be assured that somebody else will burn for ever and ever, and ever and ever; and then they will feel comfortable. Even they may be converted! Do not let us limit the grace of God. Even people who have a selfish heaven may become chastened and ennobled by the long-continued action of the Spirit of God, until they shall feel that heaven is here, and hell is here; and they will speak of the one with holy rapture, and of the other with pain, ill-concealed, but not the less expressive and instructive; they will feel that all these things must be left in the hands of the living Father, who alone knows all about the case, and who will do justly, though he turn the wicked into perdition. The man of one view always has an advantage over the broad-minded man. We have heard how formidable an opponent the man of one book is; that is to say, he knows that one book so thoroughly that he cannot be caught at a mischance or misadventure in the reading and interpretation of it. Other men may know a hundred books, but they may not know the hundred books so well as this man knows the one book; therefore he is thought to be formidable. So with the man who has but one idea in theology, or in Christian thinking, whatever its name may be. He is vehement on that point; there he burns like an oven; he is not troubled with doubt, because he is not troubled with indigestion; he is not aware that the horizon is larger than his house, it only appears to be so to eyes that cannot distinguish between differences. The glazier has less difficulty than the telescope maker. What difficulty can a glazier have? But the telescope maker, how he studies, calculates, polishes, adjusts, enters into the mystery of distance, and light, and optics; how he is a mathematician before he is an instrument-maker; through what hard words he passes to the simplicity of his conclusion! This would be very satisfactory, only oftentimes the glazier mistakes himself for the telescope-maker. We need the Pauline mind; we cannot understand it, but we feel that it is a master mind, and we, so to say, nestle up towards our beloved brother-father Paul, saying to him, with look if not with words, You know how it is; pray for us; we cannot understand all your words, but verily it is God that justifieth you, that sanctifieth you, that enlighteneth you; we know it; oh, take care ever of us, put your pastoral arms around us, play the shepherd to our poor wandering life, for we know the wolf is after us, and we need a huge man's strength to enfold us in security.

What was Paul's method of meeting all this party spirit? It was a method characteristic of his mind. It was comprehensive, theological, profound, noble. Instead of saying, "What are your differences? and let me see if I can adjust them," he brushes them all away, and says, "Was Christ divided?" it is Christ you are misrepresenting, it is Christ you are misunderstanding, it is Christ you are putting to shame; I will not hear your contentions, I will magnify my Lord. The Cross of Christ was the standard of judgment as well as the centre of observation, and everything depended upon men's relation to the Cross of Christ. What is the reason of that reference? This, that Crucifixion is the central idea in the Church. The Cross measures all things, determines all things, and ought to rule all things; and he who has accepted the doctrine of Christ's Crucifixion has by so much entered upon the practice of his own. That is the holy secret, that is the Divine discipline; not that I have only to look at my crucified Lord as a distant spectacle, I have to reproduce his Crucifixion in my own heart as a personal experience. Christ's work was the atonement; my work is its acceptance, and obedience to its spirit. I have to be crucified with Christ, and to have no self. When I gave myself to Christ I gave myself wholly; he would not take part of me it was a complete surrender. So now as to who is to be first, or second, or last, we have no time for such mechanical and frivolous inquiries; each is to be first in love, first in prayer, first in obedience.

Then the Apostle associates this great Christian act with the mystery of the personality and sovereignty of God, as we have already seen. How often does the word of God occur in these introductory verses: "It pleased God"; "after that in the wisdom of God"; "the power of God"; "the wisdom of God"; "the foolishness of God"; "the workings of God"; "but God hath chosen"; "God hath chosen." Before this noble utterance, how mean is the contention of Corinthian partisanship; how Paul and Apollos and Cephas drop out of view when the Apostle comes to set forth the right perspective, and the right relation of Divinity, revelation, duty, and destiny. We must get back to great principles if we would get back to profound peace. Paul has his place; Apollos has his function; Cephas we cannot do without, for he burned, and in his glowing energy he warmed and inspired us all. But even Christ, as we have seen, may itself become a party name. We may crucify the Son of God afresh in using a great name for little purposes. That is debasement, that is decoronation to use the signet of God in stamping our private epistles, to use the name of Christ to pass into the currency of the Church some ill-moulded name of our own. Where there is doubt there should be silence; where there is uncertainty there should be love; where the doctrine is too high for us we should clasp hands, saying, "Brothers, the doctrine is above us far, we cannot attain its gleaming height; but we can pray, we can love, we can wait." A Church that adopts that attitude need never put itself to the shame of defending its own orthodoxy. It is enough for such a Church that it can live.