St. Paul's Gospel by Ronald A. Knox

Author:Ronald A. Knox
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Catholicism, Theology
ISBN: 9781258798116
Publisher: Literary Licensing, LLC
Published: 1950-08-15T06:00:00+00:00

BODY

May he he glorified in the Church, and in Christ Jesus (Eph. iii. 21) .

HE WORDS I quoted to you at the end of my last

-L sermon were a favourite text with the old-fashioned Evangelicals, ‘the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me’. The reason is not far to seek; for the Evangelical, everything depends on an inner conviction that Jesus Christ has died for him personally, and this text was the ideal expression of it. What they omitted to tell us is that it stands alone in St Paul’s writings; everywhere else, I think, he insists that Christ died for us, gave himself for us.

The point I am making is that St Paul is, if ever a man was, a churchman. St Peter, curiously, doesn’t use the word ‘church’ in his epistles at all; St Paul uses it more than sixty times—in fact, if you are reading him in the Vulgate, you will find that the word occurs almost on every page. But it is not merely that he often has occasion to mention the Church; more than once he seems to mention it where you would have thought there was no occasion to do so at all. In those words, for example, which I gave you just now as my text, why was it neces

sary for him, if he wanted to end up the chapter with a doxology, to phrase it in this extraordinary way? ‘May he be glorified in the Church, and in Christ Jesus’—as if the Church took rank with her Incarnate Master as one of the organs of God’s praise; nay, took first rank, with her Incarnate Master second? It bothered the copyists, and some of them left out the word ‘and’. If you look in the Authorized Version you will find, ‘to him be glory in the Church by Christ Jesus’—it has even altered the preposition. But there is no doubt that ours was the true reading, ‘in the Church and in Christ Jesus’. St Paul’s mind is so occupied with the thought of the Church, God’s splendid tapestry of Jew and Gentile, that he can think of nothing else for the moment, and for once the Person of Jesus Christ comes in as a kind of afterthought.

Our Lord doesn’t seem to have talked much about his Church; his favourite way of describing the Christian commonwealth was ‘the kingdom of God’ or ‘the kingdom of heaven’. But on two occasions, at least, he did talk about the ‘Church’, and the memory it will have called up in the minds of his disciples was the assembly, the ‘gathering together’ of his ancient people the Jews, when he brought them out of Egypt into Chanaan. In old days, God had chosen a particular nation to be his Assembly; now he, Jesus Christ, would have an assembly of his own, no longer merely national in its membership. When the apostles took to preaching the Gospel in Greek, they didn’t call this new Assembly

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