VIII. The Confident Faith of Paul and John The spirit of absolute and unhesitating confidence in the truth and certainty of their message is common to both Paul and John. They know that the facts have occurred, and they know that the victory is assured. Not a trace of wavering or hesitation can be found in their writings. Where in rare cases an expression of doubt occurs in Paul’s letter, it is regarding his own strength and endurance; yet even about his own power he rarely speaks doubtfully, because the strength is given him sufficient for the duty; his weakness gives the better opportunity for the Divine power to act through him. (2 Corinthians 11.)
Two words and two ideas are particularly characteristic of John: these are “love” and “victory”. Paul conjoins them in a typical sentence, “we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us and gave Himself for us”. (Romans 8:37.) The sentence is almost as typical of John as it is of Paul. There is almost an echo of it in Revelation 1:5, “Unto Him that loved us, and loosed us from our sins by His blood, and made us to be a kingdom, . . . to Him be the glory and the dominion”. The idea of victor or conqueror is specially characteristic of the Revelation. The victor is he that is “faithful unto death,” (Revelation 2:10.) he “that keepeth my works unto the end”. (Ibid. 2:26.) It is a characteristic trait that this is the book, and this the time, when victory was most dominant in the writer’s mind. He was a prisoner condemned to hard labour on a rocky islet of the Aegean Sea. Against him was arrayed all the power and majesty of the mighty Empire. The Emperor’s policy was to exterminate this little sect. Yet every Christian martyr’s death was a victory. Every conflict was a new opportunity for showing how powerless the great Roman Empire was against this little band of men. If in any case the Emperor gained an apparent victory and coerced some individual into obedience to his command, this was only because that individual was unfit to be a member of the conquering band, which won victory after victory by unfaltering faith and quiet endurance. In a sense, however, the victory lies in the future: the Empire shall continue a long time. There shall be ten Emperors; (Revelation 17:12.) in the Eastern imagery of prophecy and revelation “ten” means a large number, but still a number that is finite and comes to an end. This future series of sovereigns “receive authority as Emperors for one hour”. (Ibid.) I know of nothing more strikingly, more completely triumphant than this expression. All this long and stately succession of sovereigns over the mighty Empire of Rome hold authority for one hour. An hour was the smallest division of time known to the ancients: they speak of the movement of an hour, viz., the time that the shadow on the dial requires to move from one line to the next, where we should use the expression “in a minute,” or more hyperbolically, “in one second”. The same thought occurs in Paul: (2 Corinthians 4:17.) “our momentary light affliction worketh for us more and more exceedingly an eternal weight of glory”. It is a thought natural to such men at such a time. In their estimation time sinks into insignificance when compared with eternity: duration in time is nothing: whether long or short, that which is measured by time, and which reaches an end, is of no consequence. Patient endurance for the moment is the law that both John and Paul inculcate in regard to the evils of the present political system in the world. In every one of the seven letters to the Churches, John emphasises the same moral: he that is faithful unto death, he that endureth, is the victor. Paul discourages all political agitation. Such action puts the ephemeral in place of the eternal, and labours for the evanescent and the valueless instead of the enduring and real things of life. Seek for the real and permanent, seek after the kingdom of Heaven: all other things will come about of themselves. In modern phraseology something of the same truth would be expressed by saying that true political progress is better attained by the growth of higher moral spirit throughout the community, by the spread of education, by the gradual emergence of the people generally on a higher plane of thought and judgment and ideals. True progress has to be bought by work and by suffering; and the work is the work of God, not the work of the devil. Nothing can be permanently attained by war or by fire or by sword or by modern engines of destruction. These are the works of the devil. As Paul says, (Galatians 5:19-23.) “the works of the flesh are manifest which are . . . enmities, strife, jealousies, wraths, factious divisions, parties, envyings . . . they which practise such things shall not inherit the Kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, self-control. Against such there is no law.”
If apparently any progress seems ever to be achieved in that way of violence, the price is not yet paid and has to be paid in double assessment, in the only coin that the law of God accepts, in work and in suffering. We are now in Great Britain paying the price for the “reforms” that were apparently gained by violence in the middle of the nineteenth century; the price lies in the false methods, the resistance to law, whether passive or active, the industrial war and the general unrest, and all the other myriad disorders of the present social system. The “reforms” are not real or beneficial until the people as a whole has earned them by deserving them and by ability to use them wisely.
Through the Revelation there runs a tone of exultation over the fall of Rome, the desolation of the great capital of the world. This is spoken of in Revelation 18 as if it had already taken place; but that is a prophetic figure. What is absolutely certain is stated by the prophet as now happening or already completed. The prophet stands outside of time; he speaks on the plane of eternity; there is to him no future and no past; all is present before his vision. In the Revelation the strain of exultation is almost too highly wrought, and has in it something of the old Hebrew fierceness. In the middle of the conflict John saw only the evil of the great Empire. The Empire was the enemy of God, bent on exterminating the congregation of Christ, and thereby merely bringing about its own annihilation. He did not see, or does not remember, that the great Empire formed part of the Divine plan: he has no thought of what it achieved in its own imperfect fashion, the comparative peace which it introduced in place of general war, the order and the degree of freedom which it maintained through the whole Mediterranean world, the security of life and the freedom of speech which it substituted for the constant dread of spoliation and oppression, and which had given the Church the opportunity to teach, and to spread through the provinces of the Empire, and to establish itself even in the great city, the Roman Babylon. All this Paul, on the other hand, recognised and emphasised; but he also recognised quite as thoroughly as John that the Roman government must pass away, that it was false in its methods, that it could not permanently tolerate the Church of God, that its deep-seated antagonism and opposition to the Church must become manifest. The Emperor pretended to sit in the sanctuary of God, and flaunted himself as the incarnate God in human form; and no lasting peace could exist between the Imperial rule and the Divine order of the world. In the due season this must be revealed, and the Lord shall then come and shall annihilate the Empire and its system and its power. This however, as Paul says, is not in the present; it lies in the future; and it cannot be until the real character of the Empire and the false God-Emperor has been made clear and unmistakable, i.e. until the Empire has outlived its time and become an evil and a hindrance instead of a partial protection to the Church, and a restrainer of the worst evils of disorder, anarchy, bloodshed and war. (2 Thessalonians 2:2ff. See The Cities of St. Paul, Part VI.) In the Revelation the tone of exultation over the fall of Babylon-Rome is so unmixed with any consciousness of the mission of the Empire as to be painful and almost repellent to the student of history. This tone belongs to the moment of battle; it is the tone of the horrified spectator who from his island-prison marked the course of the struggle, and the martyrdom of one after another of the patiently resisting saints, beginning with “Antipas, my witness, my faithful one, who was killed” at Pergamon, where is the temple and throne of the Emperor-Satan. (Revelation 2:13.)
Amid all the wonderful imagery and the splendid confidence in and insight into the Divine purpose, which characterise the Revelation, this one-sidedness prevents it from reaching the highest plane of Divine Truth. It does not stand on the level of the fourth Gospel: it falls below the level of Paul’s insight and sympathy. Yet it marks a stage in the development of John: it explains the one great psychological difficulty of the fourth Gospel: it shows the training by which the disciple who is mirrored to us in the Synoptic Gospels could grow into the writer of the fourth Gospel. (On this see the exposition in the writer’s Letters to the Seven Churches.)
After war comes peace. After the stress and storm of the conflict comes the quiet spirit of the restful victory. Then — The worst turns the best to the brave; The black minute’s at end; And the element’s rage, the fiend voices that rave, Shall dwindle, shall blend. Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain.
Then a calm. This is the spirit of the fourth Gospel; this is the spirit of “love” that characterises it. It rests quietly in victory; but it does not speak or boast of victory like the Revelation. It is pitched entirely on the key of quietness, of perfect assurance, of absolute sympathy with the Divine nature, the Divine purpose, and the love of God. This makes it the one greatest book in the world: it rests steadily on the level to which Paul is struggling, and to which he attains with difficulty. We mark in Paul the striving towards this level, and the attainment of this level in moments of highest insight and revelation. We mark in the fourth Gospel the calm peace of him who has attained this level, who attained it through the living death of the convict in Patmos, (The condemnation to hard labour on an island-prison was regarded as a form of severest punishment, worse than simple death, and on a level with exposure to wild beasts.) from which he emerged into a second life for the Church after having gazed on the mysteries of life and death. This is the reason why it has been said (Section II.) that the New Testament begins with Paul and ends with John. It begins with the man always straining onwards towards the higher life. It ends in the man who has attained and has passed through the gate of a living death into life. The force which moved in Paul and John is an idea that will constantly come up in the rest of this book. This force is Faith, “an intense and burning enthusiasm inspired through over-mastering belief in, and realisation of, the nature of Jesus — an enthusiasm which drives on the man in whose soul it reigns to live the life of Jesus”. This force we cannot define more clearly: we see it, but we cannot analyse it, or tell its constituents: it is the ultimate and simple Divine fire. Yet we must constantly speak of it and assume it as known. To know it rightly you must come in contact with it, and be possessed by it. Accordingly, much of what is said in these chapters will depend for its understanding on the vividness with which one appreciates the meaning and force of Faith.
According to Paul, Faith leads on to freedom. Error or sin is an enslavement of the mind: (Romans 6:17: “ye were the slaves of sin”; cp. 22 f.) the Divine nature is freedom. Freedom is the consciously chosen identification of one’s own will with the Will of God and the order of nature through which that Will expresses itself: when that is achieved, all the evolution of the Will of God around us is the free expression and realisation of our own will and choice. Freedom is the end and goal of self-realisation: we have not reached, but we are striving towards it. “Ye were called with a view to freedom,” (This is quoted from the writer’s statement in Pictures of the Apostolic Church.) and “with freedom Christ set us free”. (Galatians 5:13;Galatians 5:1.)
