Chapter 15 | Table of
Contents | Chapter 17
The Letters to the Seven Churches of Asia
W. M. Ramsay
1904
Chapter 16: Plan and Order of Topics in the Seven Letters
Each of the Seven Letters opens, as letters in ancient time always did, by stating who
sends the message and to whom it is sent. But the exordium does not take the form that it
would have if the sender of the message were the writer of the letter, viz., "the
writer to the person addressed." In the present case the letters are written by John,
who imagines himself to be only the channel through which they come from the real Author;
and the exordium is altered to suit this situation. The writer does not name himself; but
after naming the persons addressed--To the angel of the Church in Ephesus--he gives
a brief description of the Author of the message. The seven descriptions all differ from
one another; and, taken together, they make up the complete account given in Revelation 1
of One like unto a son of man. The Divine Author presents Himself in a different
aspect to each individual Church; and the seven aspects make up His complete personal
description, as the different Churches make up the complete and Universal Church. This
expresses in another way what we have tried to show in chapter 14: the Seven Churches make
up the complete Church of the Province Asia, because each of them stands in place of a
group of Churches, and the Church of the Province Asia in its turn stands in place of the
Universal Church of Christ.
This variation from the ordinary formula of ancient letters is connected with the fact,
which has already been pointed out, that these are not true letters, but literary
compositions, or rather parts of one larger composition. Although for convenience we have
called them the Seven Letters, they were not to be sent separately to the Seven Churches.
The Apocalypse is a book which was never intended to be taken except as a whole; and the
Seven Letters are a mere part of this book, and never had any existence except in the
book. The Seven Churches had established their representative position before the book was
composed; and that is assumed throughout by the author. They stand to him, in their
combination, for the entire Province, and the Province stands to him for the entire Church
of Christ; though, when he is writing to Smyrna or Thyatira, he sees and thinks of Smyrna
or Thyatira alone.
As to the brief description of the Divine Author, which is prefixed to each of the
Seven Letters, there is a special appropriateness in each case to the character or
circumstances of the Church which is addressed. To a certain extent we can comprehend
wherein this appropriateness lies; but there is probably a good deal which escapes us,
because our knowledge of the character and history of the Seven Churches is so incomplete.
From this appropriateness it follows that the complete description of the Divine Author,
which is made up of those seven parts, is logically later than the parts, though it comes
first in the book. This appears especially in the Thyatiran letter. In the highly complex
plan of the work, every detail was selected separately in view of its suitability for one
or other of the Seven Churches, and was then worked into its place in the full description
in the first chapter. Yet the description is complete: the writer worked up the parts into
a whole before stating them separately for the Seven churches.
After the formal heading or exordium, each of the Seven Letters begins by a statement
intimating that the writer possesses full knowledge of the character and position of the
Church which he is addressing. In five out of the seven letters this intimation begins, I
know thy works; but in the cases of Smyrna and Pergamum, the opening is different: I
know thy tribulation, and I know where thou dwellest. The difference is
evidently due to their peculiar circumstances. He who wishes to prove his full knowledge
of the Church in Smyrna says that he knows its sufferings; because these were the striking
feature in its history. And in Pergamum the most prominent and distinguishing
characteristic lay in its situation, "where the throne of Satan is": by that
situation its history had been strongly influenced. But in most cases what is essential to
know about a Church is what it has done; and so begin all the other five.
As was stated in chapter 3, the letter to an individual church passes easily into an
"Epistle General" to the whole Church, for it embodies general principles of
nature, order, and government, which are applicable to all. Similarly, to apply the
comparison which was there made, the Imperial Rescript addressed to a Province or to its
governor embodied general principles of administration, which were afterwards regarded as
applicable universally (except in so far as they were adapted to an exceptional condition
of the Province addressed). But in every case, when an individual Church is addressed, as
here, it is addressed in and for it itself, and its own special individual character and
fortunes are clearly present before the writer's mind. He does not think of the Smyrna
group when he addresses Smyrna, nor is he thinking of the Universal Church: he addresses
Smyrna alone; he has it clear before his mind, with all its special qualities and
individuality. Yet the group which had its centre in Smyrna, and the whole Universal
Church, alike found that the letter which was written for Smyrna applied equally to them,
for it was a statement of eternal truths and universal principles.
There was undoubtedly a very considerable resemblance between the Seven Cities: the
surroundings in which the Seven Churches were placed were similar; and accordingly the
character of all was in a superficial view similar. In every city there were doubtless
Jews of the nationalist party, bitterly opposed to the Jewish Christians and through them
to the Christians as a body, a source of danger and trouble to every one of the Churches;
but the Jews are mentioned only in the letters to Smyrna and Philadelphia. There were
Nicolaitans, beyond all question, in every Asian congregation; but they are alluded to
only in the Thyatiran letters as the dominant party in that Church, in the letter to
Pergamum as a strong element there, and in the Ephesian letter as disapproved and hated by
the Church of Ephesus as a body. Every one of the Seven Churches was a missionary centre;
but Philadelphia alone is depicted as the missionary Church.
Underneath the general similarity the writer and the Author saw the differences which
determined the character, the past history, and the ultimate fate of all the Seven
churches (as described in chapter 4).
But the differences should not be too much emphasised, or exclusively attended to.
There are two hostile powers everywhere present, one open and declared, one secret and
lurking within the camp; and the thought of these is never far from the writer's mind,
even though he does not expressly mention them in every letter.
One is the Imperial power and the Imperial worship, which the writer saw plainly to be
the power of Satan engaged in a determined attempt to annihilate the Church, but doomed
beforehand to failure. The Church and the Imperial worship are irreconcilable; one or the
other must be destroyed; and the issue is not doubtful. Since the Imperial power has now
actively allied itself with the Imperial cultus in this conflict against truth and life,
it has doomed itself to destruction.
The other enemy is the Nicolaitan principle. The opposition to the Nicolaitans is the
chief factor in determining the character and form of the Seven Letters. But for them
there would probably be no letters to the Seven Churches. The rest of the Apocalypse is
occupied with the triumph over the Imperial Religion. But there was no need to warn the
Churches against it: it was a sham, doomed to destruction, and already conquered in every
martyrdom. The one pressing danger to the Churches was within and not without: it lay in
their weaknesses of nature, and in that false teaching which was set forth with the show
of authority by some prophets and leaders in the Churches. Against the Nicolaitan teachers
the Seven Letters are directed in the way of warning and reproof, with strenuous
opposition and almost bigoted hatred. Those teachers drew a somewhat contemptuous contrast
between their highly advanced teaching, with its deep thought and philosophic insight, and
the simple, uneducated, unphilosophic views which St. John championed. They gave undue
emphasis to the Greek aspect of Christianity; and in its practical working out they made
it their rule of life to maintain the closest possible relations with the best customs of
ordinary society in the Asian cities. This attempt was in itself quite justifiable; but in
the judgment of St. John (and we may add of St. Paul also) they went too far, and tried to
retain in the Christian life practices that were in diametrical opposition to the
essential principles of Christianity, and thus they had strayed into a syncretism of
Christian and anti-Christian elements which was fatal to the growth and permanence of
Christian thought.
But in his opposition to the Nicolaitans the writer does not make the mistake of going
to the opposite extreme, minimising the share that Greek thought and custom might have in
the Christian life, and exaggerating the opposition between Greek education and true
religion. He holds the balance with a steady hand; he expresses himself in a form that
should be clear and sympathetic to the Greek Churches whom he was addressing; he gives
quiet emphasis to the best side of Greek education in letters which are admirable efforts
of literary power; but at a certain point his sympathy stops dead; beyond that point it
was fatal to go.
He saw the whole of life, and not merely one side of it; and he was not misled by
indiscriminate opposition to the enemy, however strongly he hated them. He would have
weakened the Church permanently, if he had made the mistake, too common in the history of
religion, of condemning everything that the other side championed. He took from it all
that could be taken safely, gave all that it could give to train the religious feeling to
the highest, and did everything better than his enemy could.
In studying St. Paul we find ourselves forced to recognise the essential agreement of
his views on this question with St. John's; and in studying St. John we find ourselves
forced to the same judgment. With superficial differences they both take the same calm,
sane view of the situation as a whole, and legislate for the young Church on the same
lines. Up to a certain point the converted pagan should develop the imperfect, but not
wholly false, religious ideas and gropings after truth of his earlier years into a
Christian character; but there was much that was absolutely false and fundamentally
perverted in those ideas; the pagan religions had been degraded from an originally better
form by the willful sin and error of men, and all that part of them must be inexorably
eradicated and destroyed. The determining criterion lay in the idolatrous element: where
that was a necessary part of pagan custom or opinion, there was no justification for
clinging to it: unsparing condemnation and rejection was the only course open to a true
Christian.
Hence arose the one striking contrast in outward appearance between the views of the
two Apostles. St. Paul clung to the hope and belief that the Church might develop within
the Empire, and find protection from the Imperial government. St. John regarded the
Imperial government as Antichrist, the inevitable enemy of Christianity. But in the
interval between the two lay the precise formulation of the Imperial policy, which imposed
on the Christians as a test of loyalty the performance of religious ritual in the worship
of the Emperors. The Empire armed itself with the harness of idolatry; and the principle
that St. Paul himself had laid down in the sharpest and clearest terms at once put an end
to any hope that he had entertained of reconciliation and amity between the Church and the
existing State.
Again, the Seven Letters repeatedly, in the most pointed way, express and emphasis the
continuity of history, in the city and the local Church. The Church is not simply regarded
as a separate fact, apart from the city in which it has its temporary abode; such a point
of view was impossible and such a thought was inconceivable for the ordinary ancient mind.
We have so grown in the lapse of centuries and the greater refinement of thought as to be
able to hold apart in our minds the two conceptions; but the ancients regarded the State
or the city and its religion as two aspects of one thing. So again, to the ancients every
association of human beings had its religious side, and could not exist if that side were
destroyed.
The literary form which beyond all others is loved by the writer of the Seven Letters
is comparison and contrast. Throughout them all he is constantly striking a balance
between the power which the Divine Author wields, the gifts that he gives, the promises
and prospects which he holds forth to his own, and the achievements of all enemies, the
Empire, the pagan cities, the Jews, and the Nicolaitans. The modern reader has almost
everywhere to add one side of the comparison, for the writer only expresses one side and
leaves the other to the intuition of his readers. He selects a characteristic by which the
enemy prominent in his mind was, or ought to be, distinguished, and describes it in terms
in which his readers could not fail to read a reference to that enemy; but he attributes
it to the Divine Author or the true Church or the true Christian. Thus he describes the
irresistible might that shall be given to the Thyatiran victor in terms which could not
fail to rouse in every reader the thought of the great Empire and its tremendous military
strength.
Examples of this rhetorical form will be pointed out in every letter; and yet it is
probable that many more were apparent to the Asian readers than we can now detect. The
thought that is everywhere present in the writer's mind is how much better the true Church
does everything than any of its foes, open or secret.
One example may be given. The simple promise made by the Author to the Smyrnaeans, I
will give you the crown of life, when compared with the address which Apollonius made
to them, is seen to contain implicit allusion to a feature of the city, which was a cause
of peculiar pride to the citizens: "the crown of Smyrna" was the garland of
splendid buildings with the Street of Gold, which encircled the rounded hill Pagos.
Apollonius in a fully expressed comparison advised the citizens to prefer a crown of men
to a crown of buildings. This Author leaves one member of the figure to be understood: if
we expressed his thought in full, it would be "instead of the crown of buildings
which you boast of, or the crown of men that your philosophers recommend, I will give
you the crown of life."
The peroration of each of the Seven Letters is modelled in the same way: all contain a
claim for attention and a promise. The former is identical in all Seven Letters: he
that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith to the Churches. The latter is
different in every case, being adapted to the special character of each.
The claim for attention, which is made in the peroration of every letter, is perhaps to
be understood as in part applying to the whole Apocalypse, but in a much greater degree it
applies to the advice and reproof and encouragement contained in the individual letter and
in the whole Seven Letters. There was less need to press for attention to the vision of
victory and triumph, while there was serious need to demand attention to the letter, with
its plain statement of the dangers to which the Church was exposed. Hence, while the claim
is identical in all, it is specially needed in each letter.
The promise made to the victors at the end of every letter is to be understood as
addressed partly to the Christians of the city, but still more to the true Christians of
the entire Church. The idea that the individual Church is part of the Universal Church,
that it stands for it after the usual symbolic fashion of the Apocalypse, is never far
from the writer's mind; and he passes rapidly between the two points of view, the direct
address to the local Church as an individual body with special needs of its own, and the
general application and apostrophe to the entire Church as symbolised by the particular
local Church.
There is a difference among the letters in regard to the arrangement of the peroration:
in the first three the claim for attention comes before the promise, in the last four it
comes after. It must remain doubtful whether there is any special intention in this,
beyond a certain tendency in the writer towards employing variety as a literary device.
Almost every little variation and turn in these letters, however, is carefully studied;
and probably it is through deliberate intention that they are divided by this variation
into two classes; but what is the reason for the division, and the principle involved in
it, is hard to say. The first three ranked also as the three greatest cities of the
Province, vying with one another for the title "First of Asia," which all three
claimed. In the general estimation of the world, and in their own, they formed a group
apart (compare Figure 10, chapter 14),
while the others were second-rate. Probably there was a set of seven leading cities in
public estimation, as we saw in chapter 14; and certainly there was within that set a
narrower and more famous group of three. It may be that this difference almost
unconsciously affected the writer's expression and produced a corresponding variation in
the form, though the variation apparently conveys no difference in force or meaning, but
is purely literary and formal.
An attempt has been made to explain the variation on the ground that the first three
Churches are regarded as having on the whole been faithful, though with faults and
imperfections; whereas the last four have been faithless for the most part, and only a
"remnant" is acknowledged in them as faithful. But, while that is true of three
out of the four, yet Philadelphia is praised very highly, with almost more thoroughness
than any even of the first three, except Smyrna; and it is the only Church to which the
Divine Author says "I have loved thee."
So far as grouping can be detected among the Seven Churches, it would rather appear
that they are placed in pairs. Ephesus and Sardis go together; so again Smyrna and
Philadelphia, Pergamum and Thyatira; while the distant Laodicea stands by itself, far away
in the land of Phrygia. Ephesus and Sardis have both changed and deteriorated; but in
Ephesus the change amounts only to a loss of enthusiasm which is still perhaps
recoverable; in Sardis the deterioration has deepened into death. Smyrna and Philadelphia
are praised far more unreservedly than the rest; both are poor and weak; both have
suffered from the Jews; but both are full of life and vigour, now and forever. Pergamum
and Thyatira have both been strongly affected by Nicolaitanism; both are compared and
contrasted with the Imperial power; and both are promised victory over it. Laodicea stands
alone, outcast and rejected, because it cannot make up its mind whether to be one thing or
another.
This common plan on which all the Seven Letters are framed would alone furnish a
sufficient proof that they are not true letters, but literary compositions which are cast
in the form of letters, because that form had already established itself in usage. Now the
writer certainly did not select this form merely because it was recognised in the pagan
literature. He selected it because it had already become recognised as the characteristic
and the best form of expression for Christian didactic literature. A philosophic
exposition of truth was apt to become abstract and unreal; the dialogue form, which the
Greeks loved and some of the Christian writers adopted, was apt to degenerate into
looseness and mere literary display; but the letter, as already elaborated by great
thinkers and artists who were his predecessors, was determined for him as the best medium
of expression. In this form (as has been shown in chapter 3) literature, statesmanship,
ethics, and religion met, and placed the simple letter on the highest level of practical
power. Due regard to the practical needs of the congregation which he addressed prevented
the writer of a letter from losing hold on the hard facts and serious realities of life.
The spirit of the lawgiver raised him above all danger of sinking into the commonplace and
the trivial. Great principles must be expressed in the Christian letter. And finally it
must have literary form as a permanent monument of teaching and legislation.
It was a correct literary instinct that led St. John to express the message to the
Seven Churches in letters, even though he had to work these letters into an apocalypse of
the Hebraic style, a much less fortunate choice on pure literary grounds, though (as we
have seen in chapter 8) it was practically inevitable in the position in which the writer
was placed. In each letter, though it was only a literary Epistle addressed to a
representative Church, the writer was obliged to call up before his mind the actual Church
as he knew it; and thus he has given us seven varied and individualised pictures of
different congregations.
Probably the opposition and criticism which he was sure to experience from the
Nicolaitans stimulated the writer to reach the high standard of literary quality which
characterises the Seven Letters in spite of the neglect of traditional rules of
expression. He uses the language of common life, not the stereotyped forms of the
historian or the philosophers. As Dante had the choice between the accepted language of
education, Latin, and the vulgar tongue, the popular Italian, so St. John had to choose
between a more artificial kind of Greek, as perpetuated from past teaching, and the common
vulgar speech, often emancipated from strict grammatical rules, but nervous and vigorous,
a true living speech. He chose the latter.
While one must speak about and admire the literary power of the Seven Letters, the
writer did not aim at literary form. He stated his thought in the simplest way; he had
pondered over the letters during the only years in Patmos, until they expressed themselves
in the briefest and most direct form that great thoughts can assume; but therein lies the
greatest power that the letter can attain. He reached the highest level in point of
epistolary quality, because he had no thought of form, but only of effect on his reader's
life.
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