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Edwin Holt Hughes
Published by Good Press, 2021
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The statement concerning the New Testament will admit of more detail. The Gospels grew immediately out of the disciples’ life with the Lord. The Acts grew out of the life of the disciples in their daily contact with that ancient world. The Epistles all came from some urgency of life. While there were minor reasons for writing each of them there was still a main purpose that dictated the writing in every case. The Epistles to the Thessalonians seek to produce a right attitude toward the doctrine of the Lord’s return. The Epistle to the Romans is a discussion of the doctrine of justification by faith and the relations of that doctrine to Judaism. That to the Galatians is both a personal defense of Paul’s questioned apostleship and a declaration of freedom from bondage to the law. The Philippians grew out of an experience of human kindness, being an expression of gratitude for help in trouble and sympathy in sorrow. The Ephesians is a composite of moods—the victories of grace, the hope of the heavenlies, the expectation of ascension with the glorified Christ, the nature and aim of the true church. Colossians expresses the universal Lordship of Christ and tears down every theory that denies the reality of the incarnation and the utter preeminence of Jesus.
Even those Epistles that are personal in their character deal with universal life. Philemon reappeared in the contests concerning slavery both in England and America and scattered the arguments of Christian democracy. The bondage of men could not well live with the tender brotherhood that breathes in the letter which Onesimus carried back with him to his former master. Titus and Timothy are the pastoral advices sent by the aged apostle to his younger sons in the faith, while one of the Epistles is the hopeful farewell to earth and a glad trust toward the Eternal City. Revelation may be filled with strange imagery and may be shaken by the tremors of a perilous age; but men who know real life will say that the Beast and the Lamb are not merely wild figures of speech. The writer of the Apocalypse knew the world, and he knew the churches in its various cities.
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