Romans 15:7

“ Wherefore receive ye one another, as Christ also received us, to the glory of God. ”

The compassionate welcome which Christ has given to all the members of the church individually ought to be perpetually reproduced in the welcome of goodwill and tenderness which they give one another in all the relations of life. And if there is some concession to make, some antipathy to surmount, some difference of opinion to allow, some injury to forgive, one thing ought to lift us above all these annoyances the thought that we are thereby laboring for the glory of God, who received us in grace through Jesus Christ. Mutual love ought to reign supremely in a church wholly composed of the Lord's well-beloved. We should probably read ἡμᾶς, us, us believers in general, rather than ὑμᾶς you (the Christians of Rome). This latter reading has no doubt arisen from the verb in the second person plural: receive ye. The words: to the glory of God, depend rather on the first than on the second verb; for they are intended to explain the recommendation.

Mangold finds himself led by his peculiar point of view, according to which the strong in this chapter are merely the small number of extreme Paulinists, to give to the word receive a wholly different sense from that which it had Romans 14:1, where the same recommendation was addressed to the entire (according to him, Judeo-Christian) church. The party of the strong mentioned here had, according to this critic, pushed opposition to the weak the length of regarding them as a burden to the life of the church, and of demanding their excommunication. And this is what Paul would prevent. It is very obvious how arbitrary is this difference laid down in the notion of receiving. Not only can the προσλαμβάνεσθαι (receive) signify nothing else than in Romans 14:1, but, moreover, the apostle would never have consented to rank himself, as he would do by the word us (Romans 15:1-2), in a party so violent.

The apostle would seem, by this conclusion, to have reached the end of the whole development begun Romans 14:1. But he has still an explanation to add: If Christ has received us with equal goodness, there has yet been a difference in the mode of this receiving. Unity in the works of God is never uniformity. Rather harmony implies variety. This common adoration, in which all presently existing contrasts in the church are to be fused, does not prevent each group in the new people of God from bringing with it its own experiences, and playing its particular part in the final concert.