Church would have missed them, but their places could have been supplied. The Church would have been there though they had been wanting, and the Lord who Himself gives the apostles and prophets and evangelists would have raised up others for His work. But without Christ there would be no Church, and no ministry at all; everything that we call Christian is absolutely dependent on Him. From this side, again, therefore, we see the unique place which Christ filled in the faith of Paul.
This exclusive and divine significance of Christ is even more conspicuous when we look at the two great religious controversies which engaged the apostle's mind in his earlier and later years, and brought his faith to articulate and conscious expression. The first is that which has left its most vivid record in the Epistle to the Galatians, and which is described from a greater distance and with less passion, perhaps less appreciation of all that was involved, in the fifteenth chapter of Acts. What was really at stake was the essence of Christianity. All who were Christians, Paul and his Pharisaic opponents alike, in some sense believed in Christ; the question was whether for perfect Christianity anything else was required. The Pharisaic Christians said Yes. The Gentile faith in Christ was very well as a beginning; but if these foreign believers were to be completely Christian and to inherit the blessings of the Messianic kingdom on the same footing with them, their faith in Christ must be supplemented by circumcision and the keeping of the Mosaic law. Paul said No. Christ is the whole of Christianity — Christ crucified and risen. He is the whole of it on the external side, regarded as the revelation and action of God for the salvation of sinful men; and faith in Christ — that abandonment of the soul to Him in which Paul as a Christian lived and moved and had his being — is the whole of it on the internal side. Anything that compromises this simple
