West Port Experiment

“Yea, so have I strived to preach the gospel, not where Christ was named, lest I should build upon another man’s foundation: but, as it is written, To whom he was not spoken of, they shall see: and they that have not heard shall understand” (Rom. 15:21-22).

Not that Paul would have withheld the benefit of his instructions from those who were already Christians if they came in his way; but what he strove for and sought after, was to enter on altogether new ground, deeming it more his vocation to extend and spread abroad Christianity, by the planting of new churches, than to build up or perfect the churches which had been already founded. There seems to have been an emulation in these days among the first teachers of the gospel, which betokens that even they were not altogether free from the leaven which Paul had detected in his own converts, when he charged them with being yet carnal. There was something amongst them like a vain-glorious rivalship in the work of proselytizing—insomuch that the credit of their respective shares in the formation of a Christian Church was a matter of competition and jealousy. Our apostle wanted to keep altogether clear of this, and to be wholly aloof from the temptation of it—as indeed he himself intimates in 2 Cor. x, 15, 16, where he tells us that he would not boast of other men’s labours, or in another man’s line of things made ready to his hand. Certain it is, that while he refrained from building on another man’s foundation, he experienced no little disturbance from other men building on the foundation which he himself had laid-and these not only the false teachers, but even men who were true at bottom-yet would, like Peter at Antioch, have laid some of their wood and hay and stubble thereupon.

The prophet from whom Paul here quotes had the Gentiles chiefly in his eye; and to be their apostle was his peculiar destination. This however, was not a mere arbitrary appointment, for we read that he was chosen to this office, because of his peculiar qualifications. He was a wise master-builder who could lay well the foundation. He had the talent beyond other men to begin at the beginning—or to lay down what he himself calls the principles of the doctrine of Christ. No one could excel him in the admirable skill wherewith he made his first outset, when reasoning with those to whom the doctrine of Christ was as yet a perfect novelty; and such being his forte, if we may thus express ourselves on such a subject, we cannot wonder that it was also his favourite walk to speak unto those who had not yet seen or heard the truth, and address himself to those who had no previous notice or understanding of it. We meet with manifold traces of this distinct and distinguishing power in our great apostle—the power of taking up a right vantage-ground whence to date his argument, or on which to rear his demonstration in behalf of the gospel. We can discern the faculty of which we now speak in his speech before Agrippa, and his address to the people of Athens. But it was a faculty which availed him in his converse with Jews as well as Gentiles—the former in fact often standing at as great, and in some respects a greater distance than the latter from the first rudiments, or as he himself terms it, the first principles of the oracles of God. It is obvious that thus to commence aright with any one, respect must be had to his special state or habitudes of mind-so as to fit in the initial consideration with the initial prejudices or tendencies of those whom he was addressing. We have repeated exhibitions of this in the history of Paul—of the judgment wherewith he took a right point of departure, or set up a right starting-post, when his object was to find an access and an acceptance into the minds of men for the truth of Christianity—as with idolaters, when he reasoned with them out of their own superstition; or with scholars, when he reasoned with them out of their own literature; or with Pharisees, when he reasoned with them from the tenets of their own sect; or with Israelites in general, when he reasoned with them out of their own Scriptures. But the amplest memorials of this rare and remarkable gift, in the most gifted of all the apostles, are his epistles to the Romans and Galatians, and most of all his epistle to the Hebrews-in all of which he lays himself out more expressly, it is true, for the Jewish understanding; but in that way of skilful opening, as well as skilful adaptation and approach, which showed that he stood the highest of all his colleagues as an accomplished tactician in the warfare of mindsor who best knew how he should address himself to this work of laying siege, as it were, to men’s understandings, and this for the achievement of a victory over them—and so could be all things to all men, that he might gain some. No wonder then that his delight and his preference was to put himself to the task he was best fitted for—whether to make a first encounter with Jewish prejudices, or as a pioneer in the wilderness of heathenism. To express it otherwise, if there was one stage in the process of the spiritual manufacture which he liked better to deal with than another, it seems to have been the first stage of it; when he had to deal with raw material, or with minds in the greatest possible state of rudeness and alienation from the gospel of Jesus Christ -whether by grossest ignorance, as with barbarians; or by contempt and bigotry, as with Jews upon the one hand, and still unconverted Greeks upon the other.

From Thomas Chalmers’ lectures on the Book of Romans