In the text St. Paul tells us (1) what is the non-essential, and (2) what is the essential of true religion, and we shall deal with it under these two headings.
I.
The Non-Essential.
"In Christ Jesns neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision."
1. The great controversy which embittered so much of St. Paul's
life, and marred so much of his activity, turned upon the question
whether a heathen man could come into the Church simply by
the door of faith, or whether he must also go through the gate of
circumcision. The Jewish literalists in Galatia insisted on the
rite of circumcision as necessary to salvation; they contended
that Christianity was but a phase or form of the earlier religion
which God had sanctioned, and that the ceremonial which had
been enacted with so much minuteness of detail was not intended
to pass away but to be good for all nations and for all times. It
was contended on the other side that the revelation which God
had made in early times was partial and incomplete, and that the
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regulations which He had sanctioned for the Jews were in their very nature temporary, and were from the first intended to pass away.
False teachers misrepresented the Apostle to both parties; accusing him to the Jews of undervaluing the Law, because he allowed the Gentiles to disregard it ; affirming him to the Gentiles to be an abettor of superstition, because he permitted the Jews to conform to it. It was then that St. Paul, in the fiery indignation of his just wrath, advanced to the relief of those hard-pressed loyal Galatians who were still holding out against the Judaizers; designing at the same time to teach a wholesome lesson to all who, at the first proof of their faith, had deserted to the ranks of error; and moreover determined to destroy, as far as possible, the enemy's power of doing mischief. "Neither circumcision availeth any- thing, nor uncircumcision," says St. Paul, " but faith." You know, he says, that your salvation comes through faith. The proof that you have faith lies — in having faith. But, if you yield to the persuasion of the Judaizers, and suffer yourselves to be circum- cised, you cease to have faith in Christ, you cease to benefit by His grace, and Christ will no longer profit you, as I protest and reiterate : in that case you put your trust in the Law, and you must trust to it alone, and be a slave to it in its entirety. In itself the act of circumcision has no effect ; it is nought ; but your accepting it now is a proof that you no longer trust to Christ, that you no longer have faith.
2. The controversy seems to be merely a controversy of the times; it concerns the distinctive ordinance of a people who were peculiar by choice and provincial by conviction. We see, however, that the ordinance of circumcision has a significance beyond itself. It stands not only for an item of ritual, but for the ritual interest of every heart. It represents here, in St. Paul's words, not only an act of ceremonial conformity, but the attitude and bias of the conforming spirit. It is descriptive, not only of one act which religious people did, but of a religious tendency of thought, of a particular way of taking things, of a kind of religious life. Therefore, as St. Paul speaks of circumcision, and deals with it as a thing which, in itself, is unavailing, there rises before us as the object of his criticism a
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character rather than a deed — a character to which circumcision seems all-availing, to which a conventional rectitude, and a ceremonial consistency, and an ecclesiastical shibboleth are the things by which the world must stand — or fall. Because this man, this life, this character, is in the world to-day, the criticism still applies. Thus these words of St. Paul are the master-key to all the controversies which have raged, or are raging still, within the Christian Church, or within the still wider sphere of the religious life of mankind.
For circumcision much might be said from a Hebrew point of view. It was. the sign of the covenant under the Old Testa- ment dispensation. It had been solemnly commanded to Abraham, and he and his race had been circumcised ; and to be uncircumcised was equivalent to being outside the covenant of promise. This was well known to the Apostle, and on occasion he could recall the fact that he himself had been circumcised the eighth day. But it was because the Jews prided themselves on their external descent from Abraham, without being at all anxious to know and to reproduce in their own lives the spirit and the character of the great patriarch, that St. Paul, in the preaching of the gospel, felt himself morally bound to encounter them with the most aggressive hostility. There could be no compromise between a gospel in- spired and permeated by the pure inwardness of moral motives and a claim of superiority before God, founded on external observances, accidental advantages, or ancestral traditions of whatever kind. The thing that produced the spiritual result was not the rite but the truth, and therefore he felt that his function was to preach the truth and leave the rite to be adminis- tered by others. And so we can extend the principle here to all externalisms of worship, in all forms, in all churches, and say that in comparison with the essentials of an inward Christianity they are nothing and they do nothing.