NOT FORM BUT LIFE

By: James M. Campbell

From beginning to end the teaching of Paul was opposed to the religion of form. It was decidedly anti-ritualistic. Paul never ceased to thunder against the religionists of his day, who put stress upon the puerilities of piety. So little value did he put upon rules and ceremonies, that he seems at times to disparage the externals of religion. "Weak and beggarly elements" he calls them (see Gal. 4:9-11). At best they were crutches for the lame, to be thrown away when the vivifying power of Christ had been experienced. Dependence upon them, on the part of a Christian, was a return to legalism. To assign saving efficacy to them was to fall from grace.

On the other hand, Paul put emphasis upon the religion of the spirit. In his contention with his Judaizing opponents his battleground was that of the spirit versus the letter. He stood for the spiritual interpretation of Christianity. The keynote of his ministry is contained in the words, "Neither is circumcision anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation" (Gal. 6:15). All his interest centered in the vital things of religion; and he never wearied of warning against the danger of making the performance of prescribed ceremonials the test of discipleship, instead of the transformation of the heart and life through faith in Jesus Christ. Rites and ceremonies were to him the mere costume of religion. Their value lay in their spiritual significance. The material emblems of the Lord's Supper spoke to him of a mystic bread and wine with which the soul was fed. He saw beneath the circumcision which was " outward in the flesh," a "circumcision made without hands" (Col. 2:11); a circumcision" of the heart in the spirit, not in the letter, whose praise is not of man but of God " (Rom. 2:29). There was nothing he dreaded more than seeing his converts "subject themselves to ordinances" (Col. 2:20); thus bringing themselves under the heavy yoke of ceremonialism from which they had been delivered. He repudiated the idea that Christianity is an ironclad system of rules; and declared, " Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty " (2 Cor. 3:17). Forms he used just so far as they were of use; but he did not tie himself down to them. He was freed from their slavery. He exercised his common sense in adapting them to existing conditions, breaking, if need be, "the law of commandments contained in ordinances" in the letter, that he might keep it in the spirit.

Mysticism has always come in as a rebound from formalism in religion. The use of set forms tends to formality; ritualism has a way of becoming mechanical; the strict observance of the letter is apt to strangle the life of the spirit. This tendency to externality, which is especially strong in the Western mind, will, if allowed free course, develop into a religion which consists in something lying outside of experience, something to be studied as you might study botany or astronomy. To this tendency mysticism furnishes an antidote, by appealing from form to life. In times of barrenness it exerts a freshening force, by bringing the Church back to what is vital in religion. Professor Stearns says, "In every age when the life of the Church grows weak, and its inner fires die down, mysticism is needed. Christians must be made to realize that the hidden life of faith and communion with God is their true life."

From: Paul the Mystic: A Study in Apostolic Experience. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1908.