attempt was made to maintain a decent, superficial unity, by the rival systems keeping geographically separate. But such a compromise was impossible. Wherever Jews accepted the doctrine that Christ was the Messiah there would be found old-fashioned people clinging to the customs of their childhood respecting Moses, and reverencing the Law; to whom the defiant use of meats they had been taught to regard as unclean would be ever repulsive, and flippant denial of the Law under which, the patriarchs and prophets had served God must ever prove offensive. Such would naturally form a Judaizing party, – a party not disposed to force their modes of life and prejudices on the Gentile converts, but who did not wish to dissociate Christianity from Mosaism, who would view the Gospel as the sweet flower that had blossomed from the stem of the Law, not as an axe laid at its root.
But the attempt to reconcile both parties was impossible at that time, in the heat, intoxication and extravagance of controversy. In the Epistle to the Galatians we see St. Paul writing in a strain of fiery excitement against those who interfered with the liberty of his converts, imposing on them the light rule of the Council of Jerusalem. The followers of St. Peter and St. James are designated as those who “bewitch” his converts, “remove them from the grace of Christ to another Gospel;” who “trouble” his little Church in its easy liberty, “would pervert the gospel of Christ.” To those only who hold with him in complete emancipation of the believer from vexatious restraints, “to as many as walk according to this rule,” will he accord his benediction, “Peace and mercy.”
He assumed a position of hostility to the Law. He placed the Law on one side and the Gospel on the other; here restraint, there liberty; here discipline, there freedom. A choice must be made between them; an election between Moses and Christ. There was no conciliation possible. To be under the Law was not to be under grace; the Law was a “curse,” from which Christ had redeemed man. Paul says he had not known lust but by the Law which said, Thou shalt not covet. Men under the Law were bound by its requirements, as a woman is bound to a husband as long as he lives, but when the husband is dead she is free, – so those who accept the Gospel are free from the Law and all its requirements. The law which said, Thou shalt not covet, is dead. Sin was the infraction of the law. But the law being dead, sin is no more. “Until the law, sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed where there is no law.” “Where no law is, there is no transgression.” “Now we are delivered from the law, that being dead wherein we were held.”
Such an attack upon what was reverenced and observed by the Jewish Christians, and such doctrine which seemed to throw wide the flood-gates of immorality, naturally excited alarm and indignation among those who followed the more temperate teaching of Peter and James and John.
The converts of St. Paul, in their eagerness to manifest their emancipation from the Law, rolled up ceremonial and moral restrictions in one bundle, and flung both clean away.
The Corinthians, to show their freedom under the Gospel, boasted their licence to commit incest “such as was not so much as named among the Gentiles.”56 Nicolas, a hot Pauline, and his followers “rushed headlong into fornication without shame;”57 he had the effrontery to produce his wife and offer her for promiscuous insult before the assembled apostles;58 the later Pauline Christians went further. The law was, it was agreed, utterly bad, but it was promulgated by God; therefore the God of the Law was not the same deity as the God of the Gospel, but another inferior being, the Demiurge, whose province was rule, discipline, restraint, whereas the God of the Gospel was the God of absolute freedom and unrestrained licence.
They refused to acknowledge any Scriptures save the Gospel of St. Luke, or rather the Gospel of the Lord, another recension of that Gospel, drawn up by order of St. Paul, and the Epistles of the Apostle of the Gentiles.
But even in the first age the disorders were terrible. St. Paul's Epistles give glimpses of the wild outbreak of antinomianism that everywhere followed his preaching, – the drunkenness which desecrated the Eucharists, the backbitings, quarrellings, fornication, lasciviousness, which called forth such indignant denunciation from the great apostle.
Yet he was as guiltless of any wish to relax the restraints of morality as was, in later days, his great counterpart Luther. Each rose up against a narrow formalism, and proclaimed the liberty of the Christian from obligation to barren ceremonial; but there were those in the first, as there were those in the sixteenth century, with more zeal than self-control, who found “Justification by Faith only” a very comfortable doctrine, quite capable of accommodating itself to a sensual or careless life.
St. Paul may have seen, and probably did see, that Christianity would never make way if one part of the community was to be fettered by legal restrictions, and the other part was to be free. According to the purpose apparent in the minds of James and Peter, the Jewish converts were to remain Jews, building up Christian faith on the foundation of legal prescriptions, whilst the Gentile converts were to start from a different point. There could be no unity in the Church under this system – all must go under the Law, or all must fling it off. The Church, starting from her cradle with such an element of weakness in her constitution, must die prematurely.
He was right in his view. But it is by no means certain that St. Peter and St. James were as obstinately opposed to the gradual relaxation of legal restrictions, and the final extinction or transformation of the ceremonial Law, as he supposed.
In the heat and noise of controversy, he no doubt used unguarded language, said more than he thought, and his converts were not slow to take him au pied de la lettre.
The tone of Paul's letters shows conclusively that not for one moment would he relax moral obligation. With the unsuspiciousness of a guileless spirit, he never suspected that his words, taken and acted upon as a practical system, were capable of becoming the charter of antinomianism. Yet it was so. No sooner had he begun to denounce the Law, than he was understood to mean the whole Law, not merely its ceremonial part. When he began to expatiate on the freedom of Grace, he was understood to imply that human effort was overridden. When he proclaimed Justification by Faith only, it was held that he swept away for ever obligation to keep the Commandments.
The results were precisely the same in the sixteenth century, when Luther re-affirmed Paulinism, with all his warmth and want of caution. At first he proclaimed his doctrines boldly, without thought of their practical application. When he saw the results, he was staggered, and hasted to provide checks, and qualify his former words:
“Listen to the Papists,” he writes; “the sole argument they use against us is that no good result has come of my doctrine. And, in fact, scarce did I begin to preach my Gospel before the country burst into frightful revolt; schisms and sects tore the Church; everywhere honesty, morality, and good order fell into ruin; every one thought to live independently, and conduct himself after his own fancy and caprices and pleasure, as though the reign of the Gospel drew with it the suppression of all law, right and discipline. Licence and all kinds of vices and turpitudes are carried in all conditions to an extent they never were before. In those days there was some observance of duty, the people especially were decorous; but now, like a wild horse without rein and bridle, without constraint or decency, they rush on the accomplishment of their grossest lusts.”59
Gaspard Schwenkfeld saw the result of this teaching, and withdrew from it into what he considered a more spiritual sect, and was one of the founders of Anabaptism, a reaction against the laxity and licentiousness of Lutheranism. “This doctrine,” said he, “is dangerous and scandalous; it fixes us in impiety, and even encourages us in it.”60
The Epistles of St. Paul exhibit him grappling with this terrible evil, crying out in anguish against the daily growing scandals, insisting that his converts should leave off their “rioting and drunkenness, chambering
1 Cor. v. 1.
Euseb. Hist. Eccl. iii. 29.
“Lies der Papisten Bücher, höre ihre Predigen, so wirst du finden, dass diess ihr einziger Grund ist, darauf sie stehen wider uns pochen und trotzen, da sie vorgeben, es sei nichts Gutes aus unserer Lehre gekommen. Denn alsbald, da unser Evangelium anging und sie hören liess, folgte der gräuliche Aufruhr, es erhuben sich in der Kirche Spaltung und Sekten, es ward Ehrbarkeit, Disziplin und Zucht zerrüttet, und Jedermann wolte vogelfrei seyn und thun, was ihm gelüstet nach allem seinen Muthwillen und Gefallen, als wären alle Gesetze, Rechte und Ordnung gans aufhoben, wie es denn leider allzu wahr ist. Denn der Muthwille in allen Ständen, mit allerlei Laster, Sünden und Schanden ist jetzt viel grösser denn zuvor, da die Leute, und sonderlich der Pöbel, doch etlichermassen in Furcht und in Zaum gehalten waren, welches nun wie ein zaumlos Pferd lebt und thut Alles, was es nur gelüstet ohne allen Scheu.” – Ed. Walch, v. 114. For a very full account of the disorders that broke out on the preaching of Luther, see Döllinger's Die Reformation in ihre Entwicklung. Regensb. 1848.
Epistolas, 1528, ii. 192.
