St. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians: A Practical ExpositionGore, Charles
Religion
St. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians: A Practical Exposition
Gore, Charles
Bible. Ephesians -- Commentaries
Once more, St. Paul's idea of the unity of the Church forbids us to
conceive of it as complete in this world. Each particular church with
its own organization has a certain relative completeness, but it gains
all its meaning and life through fellowship in the body of Christ--the
whole society of men who, having Christ for their head, live in the
unity of a life derived from Him. The head of the body is out of
sight. So also are the members of the body who 'are fallen asleep' but
are still 'in Jesus[11].' It is, so to speak--and increasingly as
history goes {155} on--only the lower limbs of the body who are on the
earth at any particular moment. And they find their centre of unity at
no lower point than Christ, the unseen head. This idea is vigorously
expressed by St. Augustine[12]: 'Since the whole Church is made up of
the head and the body, the head is our Saviour Himself, who suffered
under Pontius Pilate, who now, after He has risen from the dead, sits
at the right hand of God; but the body is the Church--not this church
or that, but the Church scattered over all the world; nor is it that
only which exists among men now living; but they also belong to it who
were before us and are to be after us to the end of the world. For the
whole Church, made up of all the faithful, because all the faithful are
members of Christ, has its head situate in the heavens which governs
this body: though it is separated from their sight, yet it is bound to
them by love."
Now it is obvious that this Pauline and Augustinian idea of church
unity excludes, instead of suggesting, the Roman method of arguing for
the papacy from the necessity that a body must have a head. An
association of men in this world, such as the Church on earth {156}
is--a 'body of men' in this sense--may be governed in any of the
various ways in which human societies are governed, not by any means
necessarily by a monarch[13]. In this sense a body need not have a
single head; or it can be ruled by a president in a council of equals.
But in St. Paul's sense, the Church as a body must have a head, and
that head can be none other than Christ, because, according to his
spiritual physiology, from its head the Church receives its continually
inflowing life; and because the body is not completely, but only
partially, in this world, and the head must be over all the members,
and not only over some.
iii.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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