§ 133. Those members of the Christian fellowship who maintain chiefly the attitude of spontaneity perform by self-communication the Ministry of God’s Word for those who maintain chiefly the attitude of receptivity; and this Ministry is partly an indeterminate and occasional ministry, partly formal and prescribed.
- The assumption, true for every corporate fellowship, that the common spirit is unequally distributed, we have already1 made for the fellowship of the Christian Church. This distinction between strength and weakness, between purity and impurity in the presentation and grasp of truth (each of these antitheses viewed in itself and also in combination with the other) can be seen in the early Church; and in each province of the Church it is most clearly marked at the beginning and gradually diminishes. Yet in every part of the Church it will long remain important enough as an inequality of persons. And even if it had wholly ceased to exist as such, none the less in each individual so much of inequality of feeling and mood remains that at one moment he finds himself spontaneously active and at another only stimulated receptively. The suggested antithesis, then, is always present, and the problem thus raised has to be solved. For those who are even momentarily weak and impure only belong to the fellowship in so far as they have a receptive capacity to be purified and strengthened, and the fellowship can retain them only as there are those within it who spontaneously supply to them purification and strengthening. This must here be considered—apart from the distinction of an outer and an inner circle within the Church2—as a distinction even among the regenerate themselves.
That the relation of the spontaneously active to the receptive is a communication from the former to the latter, and that every such communication is a service and supply of the Word of God, may be shown as follows. There can be no self-communication except through self-presentation acting by way of stimulus; the imitatively received movement of the self-presented person becomes in the receptively stimulated person a force that evokes the same movement. If this produces a purifying or strengthening, it can only be an effect such as is found in all similar cases where one common spirit works in each of many—an effect of the Holy Spirit working in each of many Christians. And as the Spirit, taking all from Christ, is ever the same Spirit as inspired the Scriptures, no expression of the individual can evoke a similar effect except in so far as it is analogous to Scripture and hence can justify itself as scriptural. Thus with equal justice it may be said that every self-communication that makes for salvation is certainly also scriptural, and every scriptural one is also edifying. For no true Christian can wish to retain anything in his inner life, and at work there, in which he does not recognize Christ; so, too, no one can wish, in his self-communication within the Christian fellowship, to commend and disseminate himself and his own things, but rather Christ alone and whatever of Christ lives in him. Similarly, no one can wish to take up anything into his life for self-advancement, save as he takes it from Christ. Hence with every communicative and stimulating activity within the Christian fellowship is bound up self-knowledge (to call it self-denial would be inaccurate), to the effect that the communicated gifts are not to be ascribed to the person communicating them, or to any private divine revelation of his own. Everything must be traceable to the view of Christ given in Scripture, so that the individual can only act as the recollecting and developing organ of Scripture; otherwise unchristian personal claims and separatist influences would break the fellowship in pieces. So, too, a genuinely Christian receptivity will disdain to take the words and acts of any mere individual as example, or to receive them as truth. And this critical attitude, to avoid being deceived, will not hesitate to make distinctions even within what is scriptural; as in a case where some particular point can be defended by a single Biblical passage, but is out of harmony with the spirit of the whole.
- If now we consider this influence of the stronger on the weaker, we can see that it embraces the whole Christian life. Even the acts of individuals, in so far as expressive of the same Spirit, are an offering to others of the Word of God; as follows indeed from what was said above3 regarding Christ’s prophetic office, on which this Ministry depends. Hence the distinction stated at the close of our paragraph is important. All the personal influences just indicated, occurring separately in individual lives, often unintended in part and in part unsought, are the indeterminate and relatively fortuitous ministry of which we cannot speak here, because it belongs to Christian Ethics. But although we have here to do exclusively with the formal and ordered Ministry, the other had to be mentioned; for the Evangelical conception of the ordered Ministry has its firmest basis in the fact that in all essential respects it is homogeneous with that which is more general and indeterminate. This view, which forbids any sharp distinction between those who discharge the ordered Ministry and other Christians, we find in Scripture itself. When Paul enumerates the different gifts and offices, he mixes both kinds together indistinguishably.4 So, too, many persons were called by Christ into His discipleship in a more indefinite fashion as contrasted with the definite relationship in which the Twelve stood to Him, or the Seventy-and-two who were sent out on a definite Ministry. In the early Church, too, the Ministry of the Apostles was an ordered one, for they kept to a definite number5 and acted upon common decisions. The same is true of the office of deacons at first in Jerusalem6 and on the same model in other churches. But the polemical effort of Stephen in defence of Christianity was no part of the definite Ministry assigned to him; he was acting ad extra simply as an individual. So, too, the general and indeterminate ministry within the churches was recommended to, and demanded of, all suited for it.7 Indeed, the distinction lies in the nature of the case; not that higher and special qualities necessarily belong to the regular Ministry: but if even in civil society the common life cannot be wholly resolved into definite functions assigned to each by the society as a whole, much less is this compatible, in the fellowship of the Church, with religious influence and communication. For, on the one hand, the Holy Spirit can never be inactive, and therefore can never be tied in its activities to definite times; rather it moves each believer to do whatever comes to hand. On the other hand, even so spiritual a society cannot be regarded as well-ordered unless there be a division of labour; otherwise none of the different gifts could attain to its maximum of activity. Especially as the division can be made with more ease and certainty in proportion as the One Spirit guides in completer harmony the judgments of different minds.