When I think of the Apostle Paul, there arises in my mind, by association, a picture of a skyline. A skyline is a very significant thing. It indicates the line of growth of a city. Just as in a coral reef, it is the outside surface alone that is alive. That is where the little coral animals are pushing forward. The city is pushing ofrward at the skyline, just as the blade of grass pushes through the soil. In the atoll, the city, the blad of grass, the cells of this outside line are pioneers. And so was Paul a pioneer. He had taken upon himself the responsibility of what has been called the "fighting edge" of the universe. As I have said, he was a co-worker with God, But it is not thos implications which cause the picture of the skyline to arise in me when the name of Paul is mentioned.
I think of the skyline of a particular city,—the city of Oxford in England. As the train approaches, the skyline of the buildings of the university makes a very vivid impression. It is so different from any other skyline seen in England. Some of the buildings go back to the times of which I think particularly. In the year 1497, five years after the voyage of Columbus to San Salvador, the University of Oxford was a thriving place. I do not know the number of students in residence at that time, but not much later there were 30,000. This seems rather surprising, but we have to consider that there were not so many seats of learning at that time, and we have to consider that the renaissance of learning was beginning to reach out and take hold of all countries. In this year 1497 there were put up on the buildings of the University of Oxford placards announcing that one of their students, a Master of Arts, but not admitted to holy orders, was about to give a course of lectures on St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans.
The man's name was Colet. He aftewards founded St. Paul's School in London and became Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral. He was a close friend of Erasmus and was, I believe, the one who called Erasmus from Scholasticism in Paris and put him in touch with the new light of the Renaissance. And it was said of Erasmus at the time that he laid the egg of the German Reformation, and Luther only hatched the chicken. It is rather thrilling to me, that the beginning of Colet's activities—the beginning of the beginning, so to speak—was an attempt to apply the new learning of the Renaissance to the letters of the Apostle Paul, and particularly to the Epistle to the Romans.
There is thus a direct connection between the Apostle Paul's letters and the religious freedom which we now enjoy, and perhaps it will give a hint of what I meant1 when I said that Paul's letters were not formulations or verbalizations. It was the truth behind the words, the experience behind the words, which set the fire; it was not the words themselves. It was Paul's words, intellectually considered, to which the old order looked as authority for its dogmas. The thought behind the words detroyed the dogmas. Even to-day extreme sacramentarians look to the words of St. Paul to justify their position, and in fact it is one of the chief charges brought against St. Paul that he actually thus formalized and ecclesiasticized the simple and fundamental truths which Jesus presented. But it is only when his words are intellectually considered, apart from their true meaning, that this mistake can be made. Our purpose here is to penetrate to the inner life behind the words. It was the living experience behind the letters of Paul which destroyed in large measure the formalism which attempted to justify itself by his words.
It was a rather important and significant thing that Colet was delivering these lectures just when he did. For years there had been no lectures on the Scriptures at Oxford. This was undoubtedly because the study of the Scriptures had become a dead thing. In the exegesis of the time the writings were never considered as living wholes, but they were treated textually. That is, the separate texts were given what may be called talismanic significance, and the best interpreter of Scripture was he who was most ingenious in drawing from the words of an isolated text the most numerous and, indeed, the most far-fetched meanings.
The very fact that Colet, who was not a priest, was permitted to lecture upon the Scriptures shows to what a low ebb the interest in the study of the Scriptures had fallen. Colet changed all this. His lectures were different from any that had been heard before and attracted a large attendance. Colet did not attempt to consider the dogmatic meaning of isolated texts. He quoted practically not at all from the scholastic authorities. He adopted the principle in the understanding of Paul's letters which has never been changed to this day, although, of course, we now have much information which was not available to Colet.
This is what Colet says in substance: We have not here a collection of isolated texts, but we have letters,—real letters from a real man to real people. To understand what those letters mean we must know something about the man, we must know something about the people to whom he was writing. With that background then we must take these letters as a whole; and with living letters like those of St. Paul, we cannot, if we have in mind something of the background, fail to reach at least the substance of the truth.
1 PtS-32 has 'mean'.