1 Corinthians 3:11

THE CHURCH’S ONE FOUNDATION

‘Other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.’

1 Corinthians 3:11

In recent years this Catholic belief has been assailed. Competent scholars come and tell us that the root of Christianity is not a Person but a doctrine, that the Person is only the prophet, the preacher the publisher of that doctrine. We look in vain in these new theories for the Jesus that we knew.

Here, then, are two views, between which nowadays men make their choice. The one finds the basis of religion in a Person, the other in a teaching. And the critical question, which thousands of thoughtful men and women are to-day debating, is, which of the two shall command their assent?

Now I wish to endeavour to answer, and to help you to answer, this all-important question in the light of certain facts. For we cannot too often remember that we have facts to deal with.

I. Let us consider some facts of primitive belief.—Let us inquire what the first generation of Christians thought about Jesus. And for this purpose let us take as representative the earliest Christian witness, the first who left on record his opinion, the Apostle Paul. Now you have to remember that this same St. Paul was himself a part-contemporary of Jesus. He was converted shortly after the death of Jesus, he wrote his first extant letter within twenty-five years of His death, he wrote the whole of his letters within thirty-eight years of His death. No mythical halo, you observe, no glamour of antiquity could in this short time have obscured the historic outline of the Man of Nazareth, to dazzle St. Paul’s eyes or mystify his intellect. Now, if you open his very first letter—the first to the Thessalonians—and turn to the very first chapter and the very first verse, you will find an astonishing sentence: ‘Grace be unto you, and peace, from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ.’ How remarkable this is! We are so accustomed to the formula and the doctrine it implies, that we fail, perhaps, to realise the wonder of it and the novelty. But with what a thrill of horror would an orthodox Hebrew of the Apostle’s age have read those words! Remember that the reference is to One Who in living memory died, so to speak, on the scaffold; remember the common belief that ‘cursed,’ not by man only, but by God, ‘is every one that hangeth on a tree’; remember, moreover, that the title Lord, here most emphatically ascribed to Jesus, is the very word which is used by the Greek translators of the Old Testament to render the Hebrew Jehovah; and then conceive the feelings of the Jewish monotheist when he heard of this crucified Sufferer being crowned with the Divine name, and positively linked, as the Giver of grace and peace, with Israel’s God! I call your attention particularly to the point. St. Paul solemnly couples together Jesus Christ and God. From the very first, it is clear, he found in Jesus some one higher than a man; from the very first he saw ‘shining on the brow of the Victim of Calvary the Divine glory of the Son of God.’ Could any creed, I ask, be more explicit? Could any loftier claims be made for Jesus than these which were actually made within but forty years of His death? Here surely is a notable fact with which we are compelled to reckon. For the first generation of believers, as for the later Church, the system of Christianity is grounded upon a Person, a Being at once human and superhuman, ‘Which is Jesus Christ.’

II. Let us notice what Jesus has to say about Himself.—Let us study some facts of original claim. Let us listen to Jesus as He talks with His disciples, on a mountain slope, perhaps, or by the waters of the Sea of Galilee, or in the streets and homes of Bethany and Capernaum. What does He say of Himself? What is the impression of Himself that He conveys? Now if you and I had the privilege of sitting at the feet of Jesus, we should at once have been struck, I think, by one thing—by a strange, characteristic undertone of greatness, which runs throughout His discourse. He speaks as some one from another sphere, whose home is far away. And we feel instinctively that here is a mystery—a mystery which the rough-and-ready methods of mere human logic are inadequate to sound. Listen, then, attentively, and mark what unprecedented claims He makes. He says He is greater than Jonas, greater than Solomon, greater even than the sacred Temple. The prophets, kings, and saints of olden time—He stands above them all. Over the very angels He exalts Himself; they are His ministers, subject to His bidding. Towards His disciples His imperiousness is unbounded. He demands, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, that they should live for Him alone, that they should give up all in life they love for Him—father and mother, children, and home, and wife. With God, again, He claims a unique relation. He says, without any attempt at justification, ‘All things are delivered unto Me of My Father; and no man knoweth … the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal Him.’ The sublimity of the sage, the speculation of the sophist, the awful wisdom of the anointed priest—all this He sweeps aside, proclaiming that He alone of men can fathom the abysses of the Infinite. So too this youthful Galilean carpenter ascribes to Himself an ecumenical importance. He looks on the seething turmoil of nations, races, peoples, and He calls them to His heart, crying, ‘Come unto Me, and I will give you rest.’ The whole great world may come like a little child and nestle at His bosom. He looks again into the distant future and sees the nations gathered at His judgment seat. The dead come up and the living come up, while He sits majestic on the throne of the Almighty and utters the final dreadful word of life and death. And when we go on to compare His utterance with His character; when we think of His nobility, His sanity, His unexplainable originality, His unconsciousness of sin, so astounding in a man who was really good, why we feel—do we not?—that here is one who is quite outside the measure of our little earthly standards. It is no mere man, though unmistakably man, that comes to meet us here. We are constrained to bow in worship. We are compelled to confess that the person thus presented to us can be none other than the Son of God.

III. One great fact still remains to be accounted for, and that is His stupendous influence on the history of mankind.—Christ has led captive all the peoples of the civilised world, who find in Him the abiding inspiration of their progress and development. On every sphere of our life has He left His mark. To the politician He has given a law, to the thinker a philosophy, to the poet a song, to the saint a passion. Transcendent works of human genius have been brought forth at His call. The chiselled stone swells into graceful arch, and rises airily into dome and spire, to do Him honour. Music for Him breathes out her sweetest chant: no other name is hymned in strain so touching. For Him the scholar chronicles his finest thought; to Him the hero dedicates his proudest deed; to Him the statesman offers as a votive gift his knowledge, eloquence, and practised skill. What multitudes, too, of obscure and unrecorded lives have been held, possessed, and governed by the influence of Jesus! He has set up a throne in the universal human heart, and millions of every age and race and class and character have yielded to His sway. Tired men, wearied with the frets of life, have found in Jesus rest and full refreshment. Bad men, smirched and polluted with the soil of sin, have come to Jesus and have been made clean, and through His fiery baptism have passed into the righteousness of the Father’s Kingdom. Timid men, trembling on the edge of life, and shivering at the dark unknown that lies before them, have looked to Jesus and dismissed their fears, content to trust themselves to the care of the Good Shepherd. Quite undeniable is the fact of such experience, say of it what you will. Unnumbered are the witnesses. Men and women, young and old, Occidental and Oriental, rich and poor, wise and foolish, all alike bear testimony that they have proved Christ adequate to all their needs, that they have gained from Him the enduring satisfaction of their souls’ desires and cravings. Now surely all this requires some explanation. All the world over it is true that out of nothing nothing comes. For great results there must be cause proportionate. Then let us ask once more, what cause, what force, what manner of intelligence can have been adequate to produce effects so wonderful? Where is the man who could grip the whole civilised world, and that for centuries? Where is the man whose power is not spent, whose influence is not broken, whose personal fascination is not weakened, as age after age disappears into the past? Could any mere man really have done all this? The experience of the race says No. And the philosophy of human history says No. History bears witness only to a Christ Who is Divine. Reflecting on these facts and weighing them fairly, let a man ask himself whether any ingenious modern explanation will account for them all so well and so fully as the ancient belief of the Catholic Church, that ‘God was in Christ,’ that Christ is God.

—Rev. F. Homes Dudden.

Illustrations

(1) ‘Corinth, in St. Paul’s time, was a cosmopolitan city. The most important station on the great trade-route between Rome and the East, it was naturally the meeting-place of men of every race and class and character. Its streets were crowded, somewhat as the streets of London are to-day, with throngs of strangers, representing widely different types and engaged in the pursuit of widely different interests. Here Romans mingled with Greeks, and Jews of Alexandria and Syria with pagans of Asia Minor and the distant East. Here the mantled philosopher elbowed the man of pleasure, and the proud official struggled on his way through surging crowds of traders and slaves and foreign sailormen. A city of infinite variety, a ferment of multitudinous unassimilated forces and activities—such was Corinth. Yet it was to this city, with all its many teeming, diverse forms of life, that the Apostle penned that memorable sentence which tells of a unity underlying every difference: “Other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.” ’

(2) ‘Christ the One Foundation. That has been the teaching of the Church from the earliest days till now. In every age and in every land the Church has taught invariably that the determining factor of the Christian religion is the Person of Jesus. That is the essential thing. The Christian religion is not a mere system of doctrine. It is not a mere ethical code. It is not merely a redemptive force. It is above all dependence on a Person. And herein lies its power and its peculiarity, and its novelty.’

(3) ‘A Church Father of the second century being pressed with the question, “What new thing did the Lord bring us by His coming?” replied, “Know that He brought all newness in bringing us Himself.” The distinctive feature of the new religion is the Person of Jesus.’

(SECOND OUTLINE)

A SURE FOUNDATION

Perhaps the chief danger is of treating as ‘foundations’ what are not ‘foundations’ at all, but part of the superstructure. And therefore you should take it as a first principle in the investigation that the ‘foundation’ is nothing which you have laid or can lay. The true ‘foundation’ lies for you, ready to use, and does not wait for you to make it.

Your faith, your love, your change of character in life, your holiness, your good works, your prayers have nothing in the world to do with the ‘foundation.’ They are consequences, not causes. The ‘foundation’ lies far down below all this, and it is often even hidden by these good and beautiful things which rest upon it.

I. What then is the ‘foundation’ of your hope, of your eternal life?—You perhaps say, ‘My trust is in God. I do not find my foundation anywhere in myself, I find it in God. I find it in the love of God.’ The love of God! The love of God is not all you want. God has many attributes, and all equal, because they are all infinite. God is justice; God is truth. Could you find your foundation in the justice of God? Could you find your foundation in the truth of God? Has not God said, ‘The soul that sinneth, it shall die’? You have sinned, and how can you not die? Love can never cancel truth. All the attributes of God must unite to pardon you. If you trust only in the love of God, it would not be God at all. Therefore your basis is false, your ‘foundation’ is wrong.

II. Is there then a ‘foundation’ deeper and more sound than the love of God?—Is there what we want—a ‘foundation’ which shall reconcile and combine all the attributes of God? Yes. If there could be found, if there could be found a Being so good and so vast that His suffering and His death should be an equivalent to the suffering and the death of the whole world, and if He were willing to do it, then God might accept that equivalent, and then, with perfect justice, pardon the whole world.

III. The true ‘foundation’ is God in the harmony of all the attributes of the Godhead.—His love makes Him, as a Father, willing, and longing, and happy to forgive all His children, and His justice makes it to be unjust to punish what He has already punished in the Substitute. The punishment would then be twice, and that would be unjust. O wonder of wonders! O wonderful plan of salvation! Look at it! More than eighteen hundred years ago I had my punishment. I was punished in my Substitute; the member in the Head. My punishment is all over; I cannot be punished. Then I am safe, quite safe! God’s love, and God’s truth, and God’s honour, and God’s Word were all committed to Him. I am safe!

But what has led me to, and placed me in, that position of safety? Simply and only the act of believing. You cannot believe it unless the Holy Spirit puts it into your heart to believe. Then you will feel it. And the Holy Spirit will put it into your heart. And so we bring in the Holy Spirit.

Thus we come to our conclusion that our ‘foundation’ lies in the Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. They are all united to us in Christ. If He had not come and died for us it could not have been so. The inner principle of all is Christ. He is the keystone of the covenant. He is the keystone of the foundation. ‘For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.’

—Rev. James Vaughan.

Illustration

‘Ministering in Switzerland not long ago, in one of the most picturesque of mountain churches, I was sorry to find that the rock on which one of the buttresses of the chancel of the little church was built showed unmistakable signs of crumbling and decay. “You could not,” remarked a friend to me, “quote this as an illustration of the safety of the house that was builded on the rock.” No, but I can quote it as an illustration of the danger of a false foundation. That rock seemed firm and stable once, but it was not tested; if it had been, it would never have been chosen. It is even so with many a foundation on which men build their hopes of heaven.’