CHAPTER 1 - ON THE INTRODUCTION OF MR. WOLFF'S PAMPHLET; IN WHICH, WHILE DENYING THE CONTINUANCE OF GIFTS, HE ASSERTS HIS INTENTION OF DEFENDING MINISTRY FROM THE ATTACKS DIRECTED AGAINST IT, AND FROM ALL THE VARIOUS MODIFICATIONS MEN HAVE SOUGHT TO MAKE IT UNDERGO
CHAPTER 1 — ON THE INTRODUCTION OF MR. WOLFF’S PAMPHLET; IN WHICH, WHILE DENYING THE CONTINUANCE OF GIFTS, HE ASSERTS HIS INTENTION OF DEFENDING MINISTRY FROM THE ATTACKS DIRECTED AGAINST IT, AND FROM ALL THE VARIOUS MODIFICATIONS MEN HAVE SOUGHT TO MAKE IT UNDERGO
In the introduction, the writer declares that his object is to defend the primitive state of ministry against the modifications of all kinds, which people have sought to make it undergo. At the same time, let us remember, the writer affirms that all gifts have absolutely ceased to exist. This is already rather strong.
Ministry exists absolutely without modification; but all gifts have ceased to exist. How then could ministry subsist without modification? In the days of the apostles, as well as now, gifts had nothing to do with ministry!
Let us take the list of gifts preferred by Mr. Wolff himself, the list given in 1 Corinthians 12: 28. “God hath set some in the Church, first apostles, secondarily prophets, thirdly teachers, after that miracles, then gifts of healings, helps, governments, diversities of tongues.”
This list mentions apostles, prophets, teachers, governors. These are evidently gifts; hence all this had nothing to do with ministry! The prophet might edify, comfort, exhort; but that was no ministry. What does the word of God tell us? We read there, that the Lord put Paul “in the ministry” (1 Timothy 1: 12); and Paul says of himself, etc., “Who then is Paul ... but ministers?” (1 Corinthians 3: 5). He approved himself in all things as God’s minister; 2 Corinthians 6: 4. If he was “made a minister, according to the gift,” he says, “of the grace of God given unto me by the effectual working of his power,” Ephesians 3: 7. In spite of all that, according to this system, Paul, as apostle, was not a minister of the word. On the contrary, “it is” (says Mr. Wolff, page 68), “because his ministry was not a gift of the Holy Ghost, that he was an ambassador of Christ.”
[p. 219] This we can understand, that his ministry was the exercise of his gift in responsibility to Christ, and not the gift itself; but I think one could hardly believe that in all the apostle says of his ministry in the passages quoted, and in so many others. besides, he never speaks of his apostleship, and that this is another thing, altogether distinct; he spoke of his ministry and not of his work as an apostle. Reader, can you understand that? There was no connection between his ministry and his apostleship; so that, his apostleship being a gift of the Holy Ghost, it could not be a ministry! The ministers of Satan might be false apostles (2 Corinthians 11: 13, 15); no matter for that: the true apostles are not ministers of Christ. There exists no connection between the apostleship and the ministry!
The writer, page 67, insists on the word gift, declares it impossible that it can be connected with the idea of ministry, and grounds his reasoning on this. In the passage quoted above (Ephesians 3: 7), it is grace (charis) and not gift (charisma), a word on which the writer insists, page 70. But in 1 Peter 4: 10, we read: “As every man has received the gift (charisma), even so minister the same one to another” — literally, exercise this ministry “as good stewards of the manifold grace (charis) of God.” In Romans 12 ministry — if even one alleged it meant serving tables — is called a gift (charisma), according to the grace (charis) given.
In 2 Corinthians 3: 8, so far is it from true that the word separates ministry, as being from Christ, from gifts, as being from the Spirit, that there the ministry of the gospel is called “the ministration of the Spirit.” In Acts 1: 17 the apostleship is called “this ministry.” So also, in verse 25, “That he may take part of this ministry and apostleship.”
It will be objected here that the gift of apostle was not yet given. This is true; the gift was necessary for the accomplishment of the ministry. But the apostleship, which is here called ministry, is called gift (charisma) in 1 Corinthians 12; so that the distinction between gift and ministry is completely false, unless the writer means that the apostles exercised their apostleship or ministry without gift, in the face of the words of the Lord, who told them to tarry in Jerusalem, until they were “endued with power from on high,” that is, with gifts for that ministry. See also Acts 6: 2-4; chapter 20: 24; chapter 21: 19, etc., and Romans 11: 13, where Paul says, “I speak to you Gentiles — I magnify my office” — ministry (diakonian). See 2 Corinthians 4, 5, 6, and 1 Corinthians 4.
[p. 220] After these quotations, one can simply leave to the confusion it deserves, a theory which, in order to justify a ministry without gift, has been willing to affirm that ministry has undergone no modification, and to deny all connection between gifts and ministry even in the days of the apostles. In the case of the apostles themselves, we have seen that it is completely false, and that (instead of its being true that the minister could not be an ambassador for Christ if his ministry were a gift of the Holy Ghost, and that ministry was exercised without gift), the word, on the contrary, affirms that the apostleship was a gift and a ministry;+ and that the apostles could not be ambassadors of Christ, that is, exercise their ministry, until they were endued with power from on high, that is, until they had received the Holy Ghost on the day of Pentecost; which Mr. Wolff himself calls, by way of distinction, the gifts. We have seen at the same time that Peter extends this principle to every gift, whatever it may be; and that each one, according to the gift he had received, must exercise his ministry. Mr. Wolff applies this passage to what was properly called a gift page 73).
We have anticipated a little; but all this is the whole subject. We have been brought to this point by the introduction itself. There the writer declares that his task is to shew “that ministry has undergone no modification”; and his system, for the demonstration of this, is, that ministry is exercised without gift, and that there is no connection between gifts and ministry.
+The apostleship was a gift and a ministry, and this, it must be said, according to Mr. Wolff himself (for his contradictions are rather humiliating). Mr. Wolff gives the passage in 1 Corinthians 12 as a list of gifts which excludes ministry, and the apostle and the prophet are found in this list; he gives Ephesians 4 as a list of ministries, and the apostle and the prophet are found there also. (Mr. Wolff’s pamphlet, pages 11, 58, 71. No. 5.)