THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS, AND THE THEOLOGY OF ST. PAUL

Πῶς γὰρ ἔσται βροτὸς δίκαιος ἔναντι κυρίον;— JOB 25:4 (LXX.).

But to the cross He nails thy enemies,

The Law that is against thee, and the sins

Of all mankind; with Him these are crucified,

Never to hurt them more who rightly trust

In this His satisfaction.

MILTON, Par.Lost,xii.

Παῦλος ὁ μέγας τῆς ἀληθείας κῆρυξ, τὸ καύχημα τῆς ἐκκλησίας, ὅ ἐν οὐρανοις ἄνθρωπος.—Ps. CHRYS. Orat. Encom.

I—INTRODUCTORY

BEFORE we enter on the examination of the Epistle to the Romans, it will be necessary to understand, as far as we can, the special objects which the Apostle had in view, and the conditions of the Church to which it was addressed.

The first conqueror who had introduced the Jews in any numbers into Rome was the great Pompeius, who treated the nation with extreme indignity.1 In the capital of the world they showed that strong self–reliance by which they have ever been distinguished. From the peculiarities of their religious conviction, they were useless and troublesome as ordinary slaves, but they displayed in every direction the adaptability to external conditions, which, together with their amazing patience, have secured them an ever–strengthening position throughout the world. They soon, therefore, won their emancipation, and began to multiply and flourish. The close relations of friendship which existed between Augustus and Herod the Great improved their condition; and at the dawn of the Christian era, they were so completely recognised as an integral section of the population, with rights and a religion of their own, that the politic Emperor assigned to them that quarter beyond the Tiber which they have occupied for ages since.2 From these dim purlieus, where they sold sulphur matches, and old clothes, and broken glass, and went to beg and tell fortunes on the Cestian or Fabrician bridge,3 8,000 of them swarmed forth to escort fifty deputies who came from Jerusalem with a petition to Augustus.4 It was doubtless the danger caused by their growing numbers which led to that fierce attempt of Sejanus to get rid of them which Tacitus records, not only without one touch of pity, but even with concentrated scorn.5 The subsequent, but less atrocious decree of Claudius,6 brought about St. Paul’s friendship with Aquila and Priscilla, and is probably identical with the measure alluded to by Suetonius in the famous passage about the “Impulsor Chrestus.”7 If so, it is almost certain that Christians must have been confounded with Jews in the common misfortune caused by their Messianic differences.8 But, as Tacitus confesses in speaking of the attempt to expel astrologers from Italy, these measures were usually as futile as they were severe.9 We find that those Jews who had left Rome under immediate pressure began soon to return.10 Their subterranean proselytism11 as far back as the days of Nero, acquired proportions so formidable that Seneca,12 while he characterised the Jews as a nation steeped in wickedness (gens sceleratissima) testifies to their immense diffusion. It is therefore certain that when St. Paul first arrived in Rome (A.D. 61), and even at the time when he wrote this letter (A.D. 58), the Jews, in spite of the unrepealed decree of Claudius, which had been passed only six years before, formed a large community, sufficiently powerful to be an object of alarm and jealousy to the Imperial Government.

Of this Jewish community we can form no conjecture how many were Christians; nor have we a single datumto guide us in forming an estimate of the numbers of the Christian Church in Rome, except the vague assertion of Tacitus, that a “vast multitude” of its innocent members were butchered by Nero in the persecution by which he strove to hide his guilty share in the conflagration of July 19, A.D. 64.13 Even the salutations which crowd the last chapter of the Epistle to the Romans do not help us. Twenty–six people are greeted by name, besides “the Church in the house” of Aquila and Priscilla, some of the “households” of Aristobulus and Narcissus,14 the “brethren,” with Asyncritus and others, and the “saints” with Olympas and others.15 All that we could gather from these notices, if we could be sure that the sixteenth chapter was really addressed to Rome, is that the Roman Christians possessed as yet no common place of meeting, but were separated into at least three communities grouped around different centres, assembling in different places of worship, and with no perceptible trace of ecclesiastical organisation. But there is nothing whatever to show whether these communities were large or small, and we shall see that the sixteenth chapter, though unquestionably Pauline, was probably addressed to the Ephesian and not to the Roman Church.

Assuming, however, that the Christians were numerous, as Tacitus expressly informs us, two questions remain, of which both are involved in deep obscurity. The one is, “When and how was Christianity introduced into Rome?” The other is, “Was the Roman Church predominantly Jewish or predominantly Gentile?”

1. Tradition answers the first question by telling us that St. Peter was the founder of Latin Christianity, and this answer is almost demonstrably false. It is first found in a work, at once malignant and spurious, written late in the second century, to support a particular party. That work is the forged Clementines,16 in which we are told that Peter was the first Bishop of Rome. Tradition, gathering fresh particulars as it proceeds, gradually began to assert, with more or less confidence, that he came to Rome in the second year of Claudius (A.D. 42); that he met and confounded Simon Magus; that he continued Bishop of Rome for twenty–five years; that he was ultimately martyred by being crucified, head downwards at his own humble desire; and that this took place on June 29th, the same day as the execution of St. Paul. In attestation of their martyrdom, Gaius refers to their “trophies” near the city.17 The lateness of these details, the errors with which they are mingled, and the obvious party reasons for their invention, forbid our attaching to them any historic value. It is not at all probable that St. Peter arrived at the city till the year of his death. This at least is certain—that, in the New Testament, the sole asserted trace of his presence in Rome is to be found in the highly disputable allusion, “They of Babylon salute you.”18 He may have died in Rome; he may even have preached in Rome; he may even have been accepted by the Jewish section of Roman Christians as their nominal “Bishop;” but that he was not, and could not have been, in any true sense the originalfounderof the Roman Church is freely admitted even by Roman Catholics themselves.

At what time the chance seeds of Christianity had been wafted to the shores of Italy19 we are utterly unable to say. That this took place in our Lord’s lifetime is improbable, nor is it worth while to do more than allude to the fiction which ascribes to the Emperor Tiberius a favourable opinion respecting the divinity of Christ.20 All that we can safely assert is the likelihood that the good tidings may first have been conveyed by some of those Jews and proselytes from Rome who heard the speech of St. Peter at Pentecost;21 or by others who, like St. Paul himself, received their first impressions from the close reasoning and fiery eloquence of St. Stephen as they sat among chance visitors in the synagogue of the Libertini.22

2. If this conjecture be correct, we see that, from the first, the Church of Rome must have contained both Jewish and Gentile elements. The mere probabilities of the case will not enable us to decide which of the two elements preponderated, and if we turn to the Epistle we are met by indications so dubious that critics have arrived at the most opposite conclusions.23 Baur cannot even imagine how it is possible for any one to avoid the conclusion that the Apostle has Jewish Christians in view throughout. Olshausen, on the other hand, pronounces with equal confidence on the prominence of Gentiles. Each can refer to distinct appeals to both classes. If, at the very outset of the Epistle, St. Paul seems to address the whole Church as Gentiles, and in 11:13 says, “I speak unto you Gentiles,” and in 15:15, 16, writes in the exclusive character of Apostle of the Gentiles,24 and in 10:1 speaks of the Jews in the third person;25 yet, on the other hand, in 4:1 he speaks of “Abraham ourfather,” and says that he is writing to those who “know the Law,” and have once been under its servitude. If, again, the multitude of quotations from the Jewish scriptures26 might be supposed to have most weight with Jews (though we find the same phenomenon in the Epistle to the Galatians), yet, on the other hand, in the apologetic section (9–11.) the argument is rather aboutthe Jews than addressed to them,27 and the moral precepts of the practical chapters seem to have in view the liberal Gentiles far more than the Ebionising Jews. The views of the latter are not directly combated, while the former are bidden to waive their personal liberty rather than cause any personal offence.

Of these apparent contradictions the solution most commonly accepted is that suggested by Professor Jowett,28 that even the Gentile converts had been mainly drawn from the ranks of proselytes, who at Rome were particularly numerous,29 so that “the Roman Church appeared to be at once Jewish and Gentile—Jewish in feeling, Gentile in origin; Jewish, for the Apostle everywhere argues with them as Jews; Gentiles, for he expressly addresses them as Gentiles.” This, no doubt, was the condition of other Churches, and may have been that of the Church at Rome. But as this hypothesis by no means solves all the difficulties, it seems to me a preferable supposition that St. Paul is not so much addressing a special body as purposely arguing out a fundamental problem, and treating it in an ideal and dramatic manner. To the Roman Christians as a body he was avowedly a stranger, but he knew that Jews and Gentiles, each with their special difficulties and prejudices, existed side by side in every Church which he had visited, and he wished once for all to lay down, not only for the Roman Christians, but for all who might read his letter, the principles which were to guide their mutual relations. He is stating the truths which could alone secure the perfect unity of that Church of the future in which the distinctions between Jew and Greek were to be no more. It was natural that before he visited a strange Church, and one so important as the Church of Rome, he should desire plainly to state to them the Gospel which he meant to preach. But surely it is hardly probable that he would wish the benefits of this consummate effort to be confined to a single Church. The hypothesis that several copies of the letter were made, and that, with appropriate conclusions, it was sent in whole or in part to other Churches beside that of Rome, is not only intrinsically reasonable, but also accounts for some of the peculiar phenomena presented by the manuscripts, and especially by the structure of the concluding chapters.30

3. We come, then, to the question, What is the main object of the Epistle to the Romans? And here we must not be surprised if we meet with different answers. The highest works of genius, in all writings, whether sacred or secular, are essentially many–sided. Who will pretend to give in a few words the central conception of the Prometheus Vinctus or of Hamlet? Who will profess to unite all suffrages in describing the main purpose of Ecclesiastes or of Job? Yet, although the purpose of the Epistle has been differently interpreted, from our ignorance of its origin, and of the exact condition of the Church to which it was written, it is impossible so to state it as not to express one or other of its essential meanings.

The first question which meets us affects the general character of the Epistle. Is it didactic or polemical? Is it general or special? The divergent views of commentators may here be easily reconciled. It is only indirectly and secondarily polemical; the treatment is general even if the immediate motive was special. Its tone has nothing of the passionate intensity which the Apostle always betrays when engaged in controversy with direct antagonists. It has been supposed by some that he desired to vindicate to the Roman Church his Apostolic authority. Undoubtedly such a vindication is implicitly involved in the masterly arguments of the Epistle; yet how different is his style from the vehemence with which he speaks in the Epistles to the Corinthians! Bishop Wordsworth says that it is “an apology for the Gospel against Judaism;” but where is the burning invective and indignant eloquence of the Epistle to the Galatians? We have no trace here of the ultra–liberalism of Corinth, or the dreamy asceticisms of Colossæ, or the servile Pharisaisms of Galatia. Clearly he is not here dealing with any special dissensions, heresies, or attacks on his authority.31 The very value of the Epistle, as a systematic exposition of “the Gospel of Protestantism,” depends on the calmness and lucidity with which the Apostle appeals to an ideal public to follow him in the discussion of abstract truths. We seem already to be indefinitely removed from the narrow fanaticism of those who insisted on the impossibility of salvation apart from circumcision. The Hellenistic Judaism of a great city, however ignorant and however stereotyped, was incapable of so gross an absurdity, and in the wider and deeper questions which were naturally arising between the Jew and the Gentile Christian, there was as yet nothing sufficiently definite to exasperate the Apostle with a sense of ruinous antagonism. The day indeed was not far distant when, in the very city to which he was writing, some would preach Christ even of contention, hoping to add affliction to his bonds.32 But this lay as yet in the unknown future. He wrote during one of those little interspaces of repose and hope which occur in even the most persecuted lives. The troubles at Corinth had been temporarily appeased, and his authority established. He was looking forward with the deepest interest to fresh missions, and although he could not deliberately preach at Rome, because he had made it a rule not to build on another man’s foundation, he hoped to have his heart cheered by a kindly welcome in the imperial city before he started to plant the Cross on the virgin soil of Spain. And the Church of Rome stood high in general estimation. It was composed of Jews and Gentiles, of whom, not long afterwards, the former seem to have ranged themselves in uncompromising hostility to the Gospel; but he could as little foresee this as he could be aware that, in the second century, the Ebionism of this section of the Church would lead to a malignant attack on his character. At this time there do not seem to have been any open divisions or bitter animosities.33 Differences of opinion there were between “the weak,” who attached importance to distinctions of meats and drinks, and “the strong,” who somewhat scornfully discarded them; but it seems a though, on the whole, the Jews were forbearing and the Gentiles moderate. Perhaps the two parties owed their immunity from dissensions to the passage of the Gentiles into the Church through the portals of the synagogue; or perhaps still more to the plasticity of ecclesiastical organisation which enabled the foreign and Græco–Roman converts to worship undisturbed in their own little congregations which met under the roof of an Aquila or an Olympas. If the Jewish and Gentile communities were separated by a marked division, collisions between the two sections would have been less likely to occur.

Be this as it may, it is evident that it was in a peaceful mood that the Apostle dictated to Tertius the great truths which he had never before so thoroughly contemplated as a logical whole.34 The broad didactic character of the Epistle, its freedom from those outbursts of emotion which we find in others of his writings, is perfectly consistent with its having originated in historic circumstances; in other words, with its having been called forth, as was every one of the other Epistles, by passing events. St. Paul was on his way to Jerusalem, and his misgivings as to the results of the visit were tempered by the hope that the alms which he had collected would smooth the way for his favourable reception. Rome was the next place of importance which he intended to visit. How would he be received by the Christians of the great city? Would they have heard rumours from the Pharisees of Jerusalem that he was a godless and dangerous apostate, who defied all authority and abandoned all truth? It was at any rate probable that, even if he had not been represented to them in the most unfavourable light, he would have been spoken of as one who was prepared to abandon not only the peculiarities, but even the exclusive hopes and promises of Judaism. To a great extent this was true; and, if true, how serious, nay, how startling, were the consequences which such a belief entailed! They were views so contrary to centuries of past conviction, that they at least deserved the most careful statement, the most impregnable defence, the most ample justification, from the ancient scriptures. Such a defence, after deep meditation on the truths which God’s Spirit had revealed to his inmost soul, he was prepared to offer in language the most conciliatory, the most tender—in language which betrayed how little the unalterable fixity of his conviction had quenched the fire of his patriotism, or deadened the quickness of his sensibility.35 He expresses an inextinguishable love for his countrymen, and a deep sense of their glorious privileges, at the very moment that he is explaining why those countrymen have been temporarily rejected, and showing that those privileges have been inexorably annulled.36 He declares his readiness to be even “anathema from Christ” for the sake of Israel, in the very verses in which he is showing, to the horrified indignation of his Jewish readers, that not the physical, but the spiritual seed of Abraham, are alone the true Israel of God.37

If the current feelings of the Jews towards the Gentiles were much embittered—if they habitually regarded them in the spirit of hostile arrogance—it is very possible that the section respecting the relative position of the Jews and Gentiles (9–11.) may be, as Baur argues, the kernel of the whole Epistle, in the sense that these were the first thoughts which had suggested themselves to the mind of the Apostle. Yet it is not correct to say that “the whole dogmatic treatment of the Epistle can be considered as nothing but the most radical and thorough–going refutation of Judaism and Jewish Christianity.”38 In his reaction against the purely dogmatic view which regards the Epistle as “a compendium of Pauline dogma in the form of an apostolic letter,”39 Baur was led into a view too purely historical; and in his unwillingness to regard the central section as a mere corollary from the doctrines enunciated in the first eight chapters, he goes too far in calling them the heart and pith of the whole, to which everything else is only an addition. These chapters may have been first in the order of thought, without being first in the order of importance; they may have formed the original motive of the Epistle, and yet may have been completely thrown into subordination by the grandeur of the conceptions to which they led.

May we not well suppose that the Epistle originated as follows? The Apostle, intending to start for Jerusalem, and afterwards to open a new mission in the West, thought that he would utilise an interval of calm by writing to the Roman Church, in which, though not founded by himself, he could not but feel the deepest interest. He knows that, whatever might be the number of the Gentile Christians, the nucleus of the Church had been composed of Jews and proselytes who would find it very hard to accept the lesson that God was no respecter of persons. Yet this was the truth which he was commissioned to teach; and if the Jews could not receive it without a shock—if even the most thoughtful among them could not but find it hard to admit that their promised Messiah—the Messiah for whom they had yearned through afflicted centuries—was after all to be even more the Messiah of the Gentiles than of the Jews—then it was pre–eminently necessary for him to set this truth so clearly, and yet so sympathetically, before them, as to soften the inevitable blow to their deepest prejudices. It was all the more necessary because, in writing to the more liberal Judaisers, he had not to deal with the ignorant malignity of those who had seduced his simple Galatians. In writing to the Churches of Galatia, and smiting down with one shattering blow their serpent–head of Pharisaism, he had freed his soul from the storm of passion by which it had been shaken. He could now write with perfect composure on the larger questions of the position of the Christian in reference to the Law, and of the relations of Judaism to Heathenism, and of both to Christianity. That the Gentiles were in no respect inferior to the Jews in spiritual privileges—nay, more, that the Gentiles were actually superseding the Jews by pressing with more eagerness into the Church of Christ40—was a fact which no Jewish Christian could overlook. Was God, then, rejecting Israel? The central section of the Epistle (9–11.) deals with this grave scruple; and the Apostle there strives to show that (1) spiritual sonship does not depend on natural descent, since the only justification possible to man—namely, justification by faith—was equally open to Jews and Gentiles (9.); that (2), so far as the Jews are losing their precedence in the divine favour, this is due to their own rejection of a free offer which it was perfectly open to them to have embraced (10.); and that (3) this apparent rejection is softened by the double consideration that (α) it is partial, not absolute, since there was “a remnant of the true Israelites according to the election of grace”; and (β) it is temporary, not final, since, when the full blessing of the Gentiles has been secured, there still remains the glorious hope that all Israel would at last be saved.41

But was it not inevitable that from this point his thoughts should work backwards, and that the truths to which now, for the first time, he gave full and formal expression should assume an importance which left but subordinate interest to the minor problem? From the relative his thoughts had been led on to the absolute. From the question as to the extinction of the exclusive privileges of the Jews, he had ascended to the question of God’s appointed plan for the salvation of mankind—its nature, its world–wide freedom, its necessity. That plan the Apostle sums up in the one formula, JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH, and in order to establish and explain it he had to prove the universality of human sin; the inability alike of Jew and Gentile to attain salvation by any law of works; the consequent “subordinate, relative, negative” significance of the Law; the utter and final evanescence of all difference between circumcision and uncircumcision in the light of a dispensation now first revealed. And thus the real basis of this, as of every other Epistle, is “Christ as the common foundation on which Jew and Gentile could stand, the bond of human society, the root of human righteousness.”42 It may be quite true that throughout all these high reasonings, and the many questions to which they give rise, there runs an undertone of controversy, and that the Apostle never lost sight of the fact that he was endeavouring to prove for the Roman Christians, and through them to the entire Church, the new and startling doctrine that, since the annihilation of sin was rendered possible by faith, and faith alone, all claims founded on Jewish particularism were reduced to nothingness. This is the main point; but even the practical questions which receive a brief decision at the close of the Epistle, are handled in strict accordance with the great principles which he has thus established of the Universality of Sin and the Universality of Grace.43

Such seems to me to be the origin and the idea of the Epistle to the Romans, of which Luther says that “it is the masterpiece of the New Testament, and the purest gospel, which can never be too much read or studied, and the more it is handled the more precious it becomes;” on which Melancthon founded the doctrinal system of the Reformed Church; which Coleridge called “the most profound work in existence;” in which Tholuck, who wrote the first really important and original commentary upon it in recent times, saw “a Christian philosophy of universal history.” Its general outline may be given as follows:—After a full and solemn greeting, he passes, in the simplest and most natural manner, to state his fundamental thesis of justification by faith,44 which he illustrates and supports by quoting the Septuagint version of Hab. 2:4. The necessity for this mode of salvation rests in the universality of sin—a fact taught, indeed, by human experience, but too apt to be overlooked, and therefore needing to be argumentatively enforced. Thus Jews and Gentiles are reduced to the same level, and the exceptional privileges of the Jew do but add to his condemnation (1:16–3:20). Consequently by the works of the Law—whether the natural or the Mosaic Law—no flesh can be justified, and justification can only be obtained by the faith of man accepting the redemption of Christ, so that all alike are dependent on the free will of God (3:21– 30).45 Aware of the extreme novelty of these conclusions, he illustrates them by Scripture (3:31–4:25), and then dwells on the blessed consequences of this justification (5:1–11). These consequences are foreshadowed in the whole moral and religious history of mankind as summed up in the two periods represented by Adam and by Christ (5:12–21). Having thus completed the statement of his great doctrine, he meets the objections which may be urged against it. So far from diminishing the heinousness, or tending to the multiplication of sin, he shows that it involves the radical annihilation of sin (6). If any were startled at the close juxtaposition of the Law and sin, he points out that while the Law in itself is holy, just, and good, on the other hand what he has said of it, relatively to mankind, is demonstrated by its psychological effects, and that in point of fact the Law is, for the changed nature of the believer, superseded by a new principle of life—by the Spirit of God quickening the heart of man (7:1–8:11). This naturally leads him to a serious appeal to his readers to live worthily of this changed nature, and to a magnificent outburst of thanksgiving which rises at last into a climax of impassioned eloquence (8:12–39).

At this point he finds himself face to face with the question from which his thoughts probably started—the relations of Judaism to Heathenism, and of Christianity to both. In an episode of immense importance, especially to the age in which he wrote, he shows that God’s promises to Israel, when rightly understood, both had been, and shouldbe, fulfilled, and that—so far as they seemed for the moment to have been made void—the failure was due to the obstinate hardness of the chosen people (9–11). The remainder of the Epistle is more practical and popular. He urges the duties of holiness, humility, unity, the faithful use of opportunities, hope, and above all love, on which he dwells earnestly and at length (12). Then, perhaps with special reference to the theocratic prejudices of Jewish Christians, he enforces the duty of obedience to civil authority, and reverts once more to love as the chief of Christian graces; enforcing these practical exhortations by the thought that the night of sin and ignorance was now far spent, and the day was near (13). He then points out the necessity for mutual forbearance and mutual charity between the strong and the weak—that is, between those who considered themselves bound by legal prescriptions, and those who realised that from such elements they were emancipated by the glorious liberty of the children of God; mingling with these exhortations some reference to the views which he had already expressed about the mutual relation of Jews and Christians (14–15:13). The remainder of the Epistle is chiefly personal. He first offers an earnest and graceful apology for having thus ventured to address a strange Church—an apology based on his apostolic mission (15:14–21)—and then sketches the outline of his future plans, specially entreating their prayers for the good success of his approaching visit to Jerusalem. In the last chapter, which I have given reasons for believing to have been addressed, at any rate in part, not to Romans, but to Ephesians, he recommends Phœbe to the kindly care of the Church (1, 2); sends affectionate salutations to six–and–twenty of the brethren (3–16); gives a severe warning against those who fostered divisions, which concludes with a promise and a benediction (17–20); repeats the benediction after a few salutations from the friends who were with him (21–24); and ends with an elaborate and comprehensive doxology, in which some have seen “a liturgical antiphony in conformity with the fundamental thought of the Epistle.”46

II

GENERAL THESIS OF THE EPISTLE.

Ὣ τοῦ ἰδιώτου τὸ θαῦμα, ὢ τοῦ ἀγραμμάτου ἡ σοφία.— Ps. Chrys. Orat.Encom. (Opp. viii. 10).

“Such we are in the sight of God the Father, as is the very Son of God Himself. Let it be counted folly, or frenzy, or fury, or whatsoever. It is our wisdom and our comfort; we care for no knowledge in the world but this, that man hath sinned, and God hath suffered; that God hath made Himself the Son of men, and men are made the righteousness of God.”—Hooker, Serm.ii. 6.

“It breaketh the window that it may let in the light; it breaketh the shell that we may eat the kernel; it putteth aside the curtain that we may enter into the most Holy Place: it removeth the cover of the well that we may come by the water.”—Pref.toAuthorisedVersion.

WE must now look more closely at this great outline of one of the most essential factors of Christian theology; and I must ask my readers, Bible in hand, to follow step by step its solemn truths as they gradually expand themselves before our view.

The Salutation, which occupies the first seven verses, is remarkable as being the longest and most solemnly emphatic of those found in any of his Epistles. Had he adopted the ordinary method of his day, he would have simply headed his letter with the words, “Paul, an Apostle of Jesus Christ, to the Roman Christians, greeting.”47 But he had discovered an original method of giving to his first salutation a more significant and less conventional turn, and of making it the vehicle for truths to which he desired from the first to arrest attention. Thus, in one grand single sentence, of which the unity is not lost in spite of digressions, amplifications, and parentheses, he tells the Roman Christians of his solemn setting apart,48 by grace, to the Apostolate; of the object and universality of that Apostolate; of the truth that the Gospel is no daring novelty, but the preordained fulfilment of a dispensation prophesied in Scripture;49 of Christ’s descent from David, according to the flesh, and of his establishment with power as the Son of God according to the spirit of holiness50 by the resurrection of the dead.51

We ask, as we read the sentence, whether any one has ever compressed more thoughts into fewer words, and whether any letter was ever written which swept so vast an horizon in its few opening lines?52

He passes on to his customary thanksgiving “by Jesus Christ” for the widely–rumoured faith of the Christians at Rome;53 and solemnly assures them how, in his unceasing prayers on their behalf, he supplicates God that he may be enabled to visit them, because he yearns to see them, and impart to them, for their stability, some spiritual gift.54 Then, with infinite delicacy, correcting an expression which, to strangers, might seem to savour of assumed authority, he explains that what he longs for is an interchange between them of mutual encouragement;55 for he wishes them to know56 that, though hindered hitherto, he has often planned to come to them, that he might reap among them, as among all other Gentiles, some of the fruit of his ministry. The Gospel has been entrusted to him, and he regards it as something due from him, a debt which he has to pay to all Gentiles alike, whether Greeks or non–Greeks, whether civilised or uncivilised. He is therefore eager, so far as it depends on him, to preach the Gospel even in the world’s capital, even in imperial Rome.57

This leads him to the fundamental theme, which he intends to treat. Many are ashamed of that Gospel; he is not;58 “foritisthepowerofGoduntosalvationtoeveryone thatbelieveth,totheJewfirst,59 andalsototheGreek.Forin itGod’srighteousnessisbeingrevealedfromfaithtofaith, evenasitiswritten,‘Butthejustshalllivebyfaith.’”; 60

How easy are these words to read! Yet they require the whole Epistle for their adequate explanation, and many volumes have been written to elucidate their meaning. Rome is the very centre of human culture, the seat of the widest, haughtiest despotism which the world has ever seen, and he is well aware that to the world’s culture the Cross is foolishness, and feebleness to the world’s power. Yet he is not ashamed of the Gospel of that Cross, for to all who will believe it, whether the Jew to whom it was first offered or the Greek to whom it is now proclaimed, it is the display of God’s power in order to secure their salvation. Even those few words “to the Jew first, and also to the Greek” are the sign that a new aeon has dawned upon the world; and having thus indicated in two lines the source (God’s power), the effect (salvation), and the universality of the Gospel (to Jew and Gentile), he proceeds to sum up its essence. “In it,” he says, “God’s righteousness is being revealed from faith to faith.”

We repeat the familiar words, but what meaning should we attach to them? It would take a lifetime to read all that has been written about them in interminable pages of dreary exegesis, drearier metaphysics, and dreariest controversy. Traducianist and Pelagian, Calvinist and Arminian, Sublapsarian and Supralapsarian, Solifidian and Gospeller, Legalist and Antinomian, Methodist and Baptist, have wrangled about them for centuries, and strewn the field of polemical theology with the scattered and cumbering debrisof technicalities and anathemas. From St. Augustine to St. Thomas of Aquinum, and from St. Thomas to Whitefield, men have—

“Reasoned high

Of providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate,

Fixed fate, free–will, foreknowledge absolute,

And found no end in wandering mazes lost;”

and their controversies have mainly turned on these words. Does it not seem presumptuous to endeavour to express in one simple sentence what they appear to state?61 Not if we distinguish between “ideas of the head” and “feelings of the heart.” Not if we bear in mind that these controversies arise mainly from “the afterthoughts of theology.” We can only understand St. Paul’s views in the light of his own repeated elucidations, comments, and varied modes of expression; yet with this guidance we should sum up the results of endless discussions, prolonged for a thousand years, by interpreting his words to mean that IntheGospelisbeing madeknown62 totheworldthatinherentrighteousnessof God,which,byajudgmentofacquittalpronouncedonce forallintheexpiatorydeathofChrist,Heimputestoguilty man, and which beginning for each individual, with his trustfulacceptanceofthisreconciliationofhimselftoGodin Christ, ends in that mystical union with Christ whereby Christbecomestoeachmananewnature,aquickening spirit.

It is impossible, I think, in fewer words to give the full interpretation of this pregnant thesis. The end and aim of the Gospel of God is the salvation of man. Man is sinful, and cannot by any power of his own attain to holiness. Yet without holiness no man can see the Lord. Therefore, without holiness no man can be saved. How, then, is holiness to be attained? The Gospel is the answer to that question, and this Epistle is the fullest and most consecutive exposition of this divine dispensation. The essence of the answer is summed up in the one phrase “JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH.” In this verse it is expressed as “the righteousness and justice of God” which “is being revealed in the Gospel from faith to faith.” The word for “righteousness” is also rendered “justification.” But neither of this word, nor of the word “faith,” has St. Paul ever given a formal definition. It is only from his constantly–varied phrases, and from the reasonings by which he supports, and the quotations by which he illustrates them, that we can ascertain his meaning. Many writers have maintained that this meaning is vague and general, incapable of being reduced to rigid and logical expression, impossible to tesselate into any formal scheme of salvation. We must not overlook the one element of truth which underlies these assertions. Undoubtedly there is a vast gulf between the large impassioned utterances of mystic fervour and the cold analytic reasonings of technical theology; between emotional expressions and elaborate systems; between Orientalism and scholasticism; between St. Paul and St. Thomas of Aquinum. Speculative metaphysics, doctrinesof sin, theoriesof imputation, transcendental ontology—these in the course of time were inevitable; but these are not the foundation, not the essence, not the really important element of Christianity. This has been too much forgotten. Yet there is all the difference in the world between understanding what Paul meant to express, and pretending to have fathomed to their utmost depths the Eternal Truths which lie behind his doctrine; and it is perfectly possible for us to comprehend God’s scheme, so far as it affects our actions and our hopes, without attempting to arrange in the pigeon–holes of our logical formulæ the incomprehensible mysteries encircling that part of it which has alone been opened for our learning.

1. We may, then, pronounce with reasonable certainty that in this memorable thesis of the Epistle, “God’s righteousness,” which, in the first instance, means a quality of God, is an expression which St. Paul uses to express the imputation of this righteousness by free bestowal upon man, so that man can regard it as a thing given to himself— a righteousness which proceeds from God and constitutes a new relation of man towards Him—a justification of man, a declaration of man’s innocence—an acquittal from guilt through Christ given by free grace—the principle, ordained by God himself, which determines the religious character of the race, and by which the religious consciousness of the individual is conditioned.63

2. And when St. Paul says that this “righteousness of God” springs “fromfaith,” he does not mean that faith is in any way the meritorious causeof it, for he shows that man is justified by free grace, and that this justification has its groundin the spontaneous favour of God, and its causein the redemptive work of Christ;64 but what he means is that faith is the receptive instrument65 of it—the personal appropriation of the reconciling love of God, which has once for all been carried into effect for the race by the death of Christ.

3. Lastly, when he says that this righteousness of God is being revealed in the Gospel “from faith tofaith,” he implies the truth, which finds frequent illustration in his writings, that there are ascensive degrees and qualities of Christian faith.66 Leaving out of sight the dead faith (fidesinformis) of the schoolmen, its lowest stage (i.) is the being theoretically persuaded of God’s favour to us in Christ on higher grounds than those of sensuous perception and ordinary experience, namely, because we have confidence in God (assensusfiducia). In a higher stage (ii.) it has touched the inmost emotions of the heart, and has become a trustful acceptance of the gift of favour offered by God, “a self–surrender of the heart to the favourable will of God as it presents itself to us in the word of reconciliation.” But it has a higher stage (iii.) even than this, in which it attains a mystical depth, and becomes a mystical incorporationwith Christ(uniomystica) in a unity of love and life—a practical acquaintance with Christ, which completes itself by personal appropriation of His life and death. In its final and richest development (iv.) it has risen from the passive attitude of receptivity into a spontaneous active force—“a living impulse and power of good in every phase of personallife.”67 In this last stage it becomes so closely allied to spirit, that what is said of the one may be said of the other, and that which regarded from without is “faith,” regarded from within is “spirit.” Faith, in this full range of its Pauline meaning, is both a single act and a progressive principle. As a singleact, it is the self–surrender of the soul to God, the laying hold of Christ, the sole means whereby we appropriate this reconciling love, in which point of view it may be regarded as the root of the new relation of man to God in justification and adoption. As a progressive principle it is the renewal of the personal life in sanctification68—a preservation of the “righteousness of God” objectively bestowed upon us, in the inward and ever–deepening righteousness of our own life; it is, in fact, a new and spiritual life, lived in the faith of the Son of God, who loved us, and gave Himself for us.69 And hence will be seen at once the absurdity of any radical antithesis between Christian faith and Christian works, since they can no more exist apart from each other than the tree which is severed from the root, or, to use the illustration of Luther, than fire can exist apart from light and heat. “Justification and sanctification,” says Calvin, “cohere, but they are not one and the same. It is faith alone which justifies, and yet the faith which justifies is not alone; just as it is the heat alone of the sun which warms the earth, and yet in the sun it is not alone, because it is always conjoined with light.”

In accordance with his usual manner when he is enunciating a new truth, St. Paul seeks to support it by the Old Testament Scriptures, and reads the deeper meaning which he has now developed into the words, “The just shall live by faith,” which Habakkuk had used in the far simpler sense of “the just shall be delivered by his fidelity.” But St. Paul reads these simple words by the light of his own spiritual illumination, which, like the fabled splendour on the graven gems of the Urim, makes them flash into yet diviner oracles. Into the words “faith” and “life” he infuses a significance which he had learnt from revelation, and, as has been truly said, where Habakkuk ends, Paul begins. And, in fact, his very phrase, “justification by faith,” marks the meeting–point of two dispensations. The conception of “justification” has its roots in Judaism; the conception of “faith” is peculiarly Christian. The latter word so completely dominates over the former, that δικαιοσύνη from its first meaning of “righteousness,” a quality of God, comes to mean subjectively “justification” as a condition of man—the adequate relation in which man has to stand towards God. Man’s appropriation of God’s reconciling love in Christ has issued in a change in man’s personal life: justification has become sanctification, which is the earnest of future glory

III

UNIVERSALITY OF SIN.

“Ruit in vetitum, damni secura, libido.”—CLAUD.

HAVING thus endeavoured to render clear the one subject which underlies the entire system of St. Paul’s theology, we can proceed more rapidly in trying to catch his line of thought through the remainder of the Epistle.

i. Now, since the Apostle had already dwelt on the universality of the Gospel, it was necessary to show that it applied equally to Jews and Pagans; that the universality of free grace was necessitated by the universality of wilful sin. Righteousness and sin, soteriology and hamartiology, are the fundamental thoughts in St. Paul’s theological system. The first is a theoretic consequence of our conception of God’s nature; the second an historic fact deducible from experience and conscience.

As there is a righteousness of God which is being revealed in the Gospel, so, too, there is a wrath of God against sin which is ever being revealed from heaven, by the inevitable working of God’s own appointed laws, against all godlessness and unrighteousness of those who in their unrighteousness suppress the truth.70 And since the world is mainly Gentile, he speaks of the Gentiles first. Some might imagine that their ignorance of God made them excusable. Not so. The facts which render them inexcusable71 are (i.) that God did in reality manifest Himself to them, and the invisibilities of His eternal power and Godhead were clearly visible in His works;72 and (ii.) that though they knew God, yet by denying Him the due glory and gratitude, they suffered themselves to plunge into the penal darkness of ignorant speculation, and the penal folly of self–asserted wisdom, and the self–convicted boast of a degraded culture, until they sank to such depths of spiritual imbecility as to end even in the idolatry of reptiles;73 and (iii.) because mental infatuation, both as its natural result and as its fearful punishment, issued in moral crime. Their sin was inexcusable, because it was the outcome and the retribution, and the natural child, of sin. Because they guiltily abandoned God, God abandoned them to their own guiltiness.74 The conscious lie of idolatry became the conscious infamy of uncleanness. Those “passions of dishonour” to which God abandoned them rotted the heart of manhood with their retributive corruption, and affected even women with their execrable stain.75 Pagan society, in its hideous disintegration, became one foul disease of unnatural depravity. The cancer of it ate into the heart; the miasma of it tainted the air. Even the moralists of Paganism were infected with its vileness.76 God scourged their moral ignorance by suffering it to become a deeper ignorance. He punished their contempt by letting them make themselves utterly contemptible. The mere consequence of this abandonment of them was a natural Nemesis, a justice in kind, beginning even in this life, whereby their unwillingness to discern Him became an incapacity to discern77 the most elementary distinctions between nobleness and shame. Therefore, their hearts became surcharged with every element of vileness;—with impurity in its most abysmal degradations, with hatred alike in its meanest and its most virulent developments, with insolence culminating in the deliberate search for fresh forms of evil,78 with cruelty and falsity in their most repulsive features. And the last worst crime of all—beyond which crime itself could go no further—was the awfully defiant attitude of moral evil, which led them—while they were fully aware of God’s sentence of death,79 pronounced on willing guilt—not only to incur it themselves, but, with a devilish delight in human depravity and human ruin, to take a positive pleasure in those who practise the same. Sin, as has been truly said, reaches its climax in wicked maxims and wicked principles. It is no longer Vice the result of moral weakness, or the outcome of an evil education, but Vice deliberately accepted with all its consequences, Vice assuming the airs of self–justification, Vice in act becoming Vice in elaborate theory—the unblushing shamelessness of Sodom in horrible aggravation of its polluting sin.80

Thus did Paul brand the insolent brow of Pagan life. It is well for the world—it is above all well for the world in those ages of transition and decay, when there is ever an undercurrent of tendency towards Pagan ideals—to know what Paganism was, and ever tended to become. It is well for the world that it should have been made to see, once for all, what features lurked under the smiling mask, what a heart of agony, rank with hatred, charred with self–indulgence,81 lay throbbing under the purple robe. And in St. Paul’s description not one accusation is too terrible, not one colour is too dark. He does but make known to us what heathen writers unblushingly reveal in those passages in which, like waves of a troubled sea, they foam out their own mire and dirt.82 It is false to say that Christianity has added to the gloom of the world. It is false that it has weakened its literature, or cramped its art. It has been wilfully perverted; it has been ignorantly misunderstood. Rightly interpreted it does not sanction a single doctrine, or utter a single precept, which is meant to extinguish one happy impulse, or dim one innocent delight. What it does is to warn us against seeking and following the lowest and most short–lived pleasures as a final end. This was the fatal error of the popular Hedonism. St. Paul’s sketch of its moral dissolution and the misery and shame which it inevitably involved, is but another illustration of the truth that

“Who follows pleasure, pleasure slays,

God’s wrath upon himself he wreaks;

But all delights attend his days

Who takes with thanks but never seeks.”

ii. Having thus accomplished his task of proving the guilt of the Gentiles, he turns to the Jews. But he does so with consummate tact. He does not at once startle them into antagonism, by shocking all their prejudices, but begins with the perfectly general statement, “Therefore83 thou art inexcusable, O man—every one who judgest.” The “therefore” impetuously anticipates the reason why he who judges others is, in this instance, inexcusable— namely, because he does the same things himself. He does not at once say, as he might have done, “You who are Jews are as inexcusable as the Gentiles, because in judging them you are condemning yourselves, and though you habitually call them ‘sinners’ you are no less sinners yourselves.”84 This is the conclusion at which he points, but he wishes the Jew to be led step by step into self–condemnation, less hollow than vague generalities.85 He is of course speaking alike of Jews and of Pagans generically, and not implying that there were no exceptions. But he has to introduce the argument against the Jews carefully and gradually, because, blinded by their own privileges, they were apt to take a very different view of their own character. But they were less excusable because more enlightened. He therefore begins, “O man,” and not “O Jew,” and asks the imaginary person to whom he is appealing whether he thinks that God will in his case make an individual exception to His own inflexible decrees? or whether he intends to despise the riches of God’s endurance, by ignoring86 that its sole intention is to lead him to repentance—and so to heap up against himself a horrible treasury of final ruin? God’s law is rigid, universal, absolute. It is that God will repay every man all to his works.87 This law is illustrated by a twofold amplification, which, beginning and ending with the reward of goodness, and inserting twice over in the middle clause the punishment of sin,88 expresses the thought that this rule applies to all, by twice repeating that it applies to the Jew first and also to the Greek; but to the Jew first, only because of his fuller knowledge and, therefore, deeper responsibility. And having thus introduced the name of the Jew, he lays down with a firm hand the eternal principle—so infinitely blessed, yet so startlingly new to the prejudices of a nation which for more than a thousand years had been intoxicating itself with the incense of spiritual pride—that there is no respect of personswithGod. Each section of humanity shall be judged in accordance with its condition.

“As many as sinned without the Law, shall also without the Law perish; and as many as sinned in the Law, shall be condemned by the Law.” Righteousness before God depends, not on possessionof the Law, but on obedience to it. Gentiles as well as Jews had a law; Jews the Mosaic law, Gentiles a natural law written on their hearts, and sufficiently clear to secure, at the day of judgment,89 their acquittal or condemnation before the prophetic session of their own consciences, in accordance with the decision of Christ the Judge.90 Jew, then, and Gentile stand before God equally guilty, because equally condemned of failure to fulfil the moral law which God had laid down to guide their lives. The word “ALL,” as has been truly observed, is the governing word of the entire Epistle. All—for whatever may be the modifications which may be though necessary, St. Paul does not himself make them—allare equally guilty, all are equally redeemed. All have been temporarily rejected, all shall be ultimately received. All shall be finally brought into living harmony with that God who is above all, and through all, and in all,—by whom, and from whom, and unto whom, all things are, and all things tend.91

And then Paul turns up on the self–satisfied Jew, who has been thus insensibly entrapped (as it were) into the mental admission of his own culpability, and after painting in a few touches his self–satisfied pretensions to spiritual, moral, and intellectual superiority, and then leaving his sentence unfinished, bursts into a question of indignant eloquence, in which there is no longer any masked sarcasm, but terribly serious denunciation of undeniable sins. He does not use one word of open raillery, or give offence by painting in too glaring colours the weaknesses, follies, and hypocrisies of the Pharisee, yet the picture which stands out from phrases in themselves perfectly polished, and even apparently complimentary, is the picture of the full–blown religionist in all his assumed infallibility, and the very air of the “Stand aside, for I am holier than thou.”

“But if”92 (so we may draw out the splendid rhetoric), “if thou vauntest the proud name of Jew,93 and makest the Law the pillow of thy confidence,94 and boastest thy monopoly in God, and art the only one “who canst recognise His will, and discriminatest the transcendent95 in niceties of moral excellence, being trained in the Law from infancy,—if thou art quite convinced that thou art a Leader of the blind, a Light of those in darkness, one who can train the foolishness, and instruct the infancy of all the world besides, possessing as thou dost the very form and body of knowledge and of truth in the Law—thouthenthatteachest another,dostthounotteachthyself? thou that preachest against theft, art thou a thief? thou that forbiddest adultery, art thou an adulterer?96 loather of idols, dost thou rob temples?97 boaster in the Law, by violation of the Law dost thou dishonour God? For”—and here he drops the interrogative to pronounce upon them the categorical condemnation which was as true then as in the days of the Prophet— “for on your account the name of God is being blasphemed among the Gentiles.”98 They had relied on sacrifices and offerings, on tithes and phylacteries, on ablutions and mezuzoth,—but “omnia vanitas praeter amareDeumetillisoliservire,” — “all things are emptiness save to love God, and serve Him only,”—and this weightier matter of the Law they had utterly neglected in scrupulous attention to its most insignificant minutiæ. In fact, the difference between Heathenism and Judaism before God was the difference between Vice and Sin. The Jews were guilty of the sin of violating express commands; the heathens sank into an actual degradation of nature. The heathens had been punished for an unnatural transposition of the true order of the universe by being suffered to pervert all natural relations, and so to sink into moral self–debasement; but the Jews had been “admitted into a holier sanctuary,” and so were “guilty of a deeper sacrilege.”99

From this impassioned strain he descends—in a manner very characteristic of his style—into a calmer tone. “But”— some Jew might urge, in accordance with the stubborn prejudices of theological assumption, which by dint of assertion, has passed into invincible belief—“but we are circumcised! Surely you would not put us on a level with the uncircumcised—the dogs and sinners of the Gentiles?” To such an implied objection, touching as it does on a point wholly secondary, however primary might be the importance which the Jew attached to it, St. Paul can now give a very decisive answer, because with wonderful power he has already stripped them of all genuine precedence and involved them in a common condemnation. He therefore replies in words which, however calm and grave, would have sounded to a Jerusalem Pharisee like stinging paradox.

“Circumcision is indeed an advantage if thou keepest the Law; but if thou art—as I have generically shown that thou art—a violator of the Law, then thy circumcision has becomeuncircumcision.100 If, then, the circumcision of the disobedient Jew is really uncircumcision, is it not conversely plain that the ‘uncircumcision of the obedient Gentile is virtually circumcision,’101 and is even in a position to pass judgement upon Jewish circumcision? God (strange and heretical as you may think it) loves the man who does his duty more than the man who bears a cutting in his flesh. You praise literal circumcision; God praises the unseen circumcision of the heart. Offensive as the antithesis may sound to you, the faithless Jew is but a Gentile; the faithful Gentile is, in God’s sight, an honoured Jew! Though none may have told you this truth before—though you denounce it as blasphemous, and dangerous, and contrary to Scripture—yet, for all that, the mere national Judaism is a spiritual nonentity; the Judaism of moral faithfulness alone is dear to God.”102

IV

OBJECTIONS AND CONFIRMATIONS

“The stars of morn shall see Him rise

Out of His grave, fresh as the dawning light;

Thy ransom paid, which man from death redeems,

His death for man, as many as offered life

Neglect not, and the benefit embrace

Of faith, not void of works.”—MILTON, Par.Lost,xii.

So far then, both by fact and by theory, he has shown that Jews and Gentiles are equal before God; equally guilty, equally redeemed. But here a Jew might exclaim in horror, “Has the Jew then no superiority? Is circumcision wholly without advantage?” Here St. Paul makes a willing concession, and replies, “Much advantage every way. First, because they were entrusted with the oracles of God.” The result of that advantage was that the Jew stood at a higher stage of religious consciousness than the Gentile. Judaism was the religion of revelation, and therefore the religion of the promise; and therefore the religion which typically and symbolically contained the elements of Christianity; and the religion of the idea which in Christianity was realised. Christianity was, inded, spiritualised Judaism, an advance from servitude to freedom, from nonage to majority, from childhood to maturity, from the flesh to the spirit; yet even in this view Judaism had been, by virtue of its treasure of revelation, preparatory to the absolute religion.103 This was its first advantage. What he might have added as his secondly and tthirdly, we may conjecture from a subsequent allusion,104 but at this point he is led into a digression by his eagerness to show that his previous arguments involved no abandonment on God’s part of His own promises. This might be urged as an objection to what he has been saying. He answers it in one word:—

Some of the Jews had been unfaithful; shall their unfaithfulness nullify God’s faith? Away with the thought!105 Alike Scripture and reason insist on God’s truthfulness, though every man were thereby proved a liar. The horror with which he rejects the notion that God has proved false, interferes with the clearness of his actual reply. It lies in the word “some.” God’s promises were true; true to the nation as a nation; for somethey had been nullified by the moral disobedience which has its root in unbelief, but for all true Jews the promises were true.106

A still bolder objection might be urged—“All men, you say, are guilty. In their guilt lies the Divine necessity for God’s scheme of justification. Must not God, then, be unjust in inflicting wrath?” In the very middle of the objection the Apostle stops short—first to apologise for even formulating a thought so blasphemous—“I am speaking as men speak;”107 “these thoughts are not my own;”—then to repudiate it with horror, “Away with the thought!”—lastly, to refute it by anticipation, “If it were so, how shall God judge the world?”108 Thus fortified, as it were, by the reductio ad absurdum, and purified by the moral justification, he follows this impious logic to its conclusion—“God’s truth, it seems, abounded in my falseness; why, then, am I still being judged as a sinner? and why”—“such [he pauses to remark] is the blasphemous language attributed to me!”— “why may we not do evil that good may come?” To this monstrous perversion of his teaching he deigns no further immediate reply. There are in theology, as in nature, admitted antinomies. The relative truth of doctrines, their truth as regards mankind, is not affected by pushing them into the regions of the absolute, and showing that they involve contradictions if thrown into syllogisms. We may not push the truths of the finite and the temporal into the regions of the infinite and the eternal. Syllogistically stated, the existence of evil might be held to demonstrateeither the weakness or the cruelty of God; but such syllogisms, without the faintest attempt to answer them, are flung aside as valueless and irrelevant by the faith and conscience of mankind. The mere statement of some objections is their most effective refutation. It shows that they involve an absurdity easily recognisable. However logically correct, they are so morally repulsive, so spiritually false, that silence is the only answer of which they are worthy. Such an objection is the one which Paul has just stated. It is sufficient to toss it away with the sense of shuddering repulsion—the horrornaturalis—involved in a μὴ γένοιτο. It is enough to bid it avaunt, as we might avert with a formula an evil omen. People say that Paul has taught the hideous lie that we may sin to get experience—or sin to add to Christ’s redeeming glory—or that the end justifies the means—or that we may do evil that good may come. “Theysay—What saythey?Letthemsay!” All that Paul has to say to them is merely that “their judgment is just.”109

What further, then, can the Jew allege?110 Absolutely nothing! In spite of every objection, Jew and Gentile are all proved to be under sin. Here this section of the proof might close, and on a demonstrated fact of human history Paul might have based his Gospel theology. But neither to himself nor to his readers would the proof have seemed complete without Old Testament sanction. He therefore proceeds to quote a number of fragmentary passages from the fifth, tenth, fourteenth, and hundred–and–fortieth Psalms, and from the fifty–ninth of Isaiah, the validity of which, in this connexion, he rests upon their use of the word “all,” which implies Jews as well as Gentiles. The Law (which here means the Old Testament generally) must includethe Jews, because it is specially addressedto Jews. The intention, then, of the Law “is that everymouth may be stopped, and alltheworld be recognised as guilty before God;” guilty because111 by the works of the Law112—seeing that, as a fact, neither Jew nor Gentile has obeyed it—no flesh shall be justified before God. Half, then, of his task is done. For before he could prove the thesis of 1:17, that in the Gospel was being revealed a justification by faith—it was necessary for him to demonstrate that by no other means could justification be attained. “For”—and here he introduces an anticipative thought, which later on in his epistle he will have seriously to prove—“by the Law is the full knowledge of sin.”113 V

JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH

“1. { Paedagogica } illae sunt

(Caerimoniae) necessariae sed Justitia non justificant. 2. Civilis

(Decalogus) 3.

Dei et fidei,

coram Deo

Justificat.”

LUTHER, Colloqu. i. 30.

iii. “But now,” he says, and this introduces one of the fullest and weightiest passages in all his writings, “without the Law”—which all have failed to keep—“the righteousness of God,” both in itself and as an objective gift of justification to man, “has been manifested, being witnessed to by the Law and the Prophets.” The nature of that witness he will show later on; at present he pauses to give a fuller, and indeed an exhaustive, definition of what he means by “the righteousness of God.” “I mean the righteousness of God accepted by means of faith in Jesus Christ, coming to and upon all believers— all, for there is no difference. For all sinned, and are failing to attain the glory of God, being justified freely by His grace, by means of the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as a propitiation,114 by means of faith in His blood, for the manifestation of His own righteousness”—which righteousness might otherwise have been doubted or misunderstood—“because of the prætermission of past sins in God’s forbearance; with a view (I say) to the manifestation of this righteousness at this present epoch, that He might, by a divine paradox, and by a new and divinely predestined righteousness, be just and the justifier of him whose life springs from faith in Jesus.”115

Let us pause to enumerate the separate elements of this great statement. It brings before us in one view—

1. Justification,—the new relation of reconcilement between man and God.

2. Faith,—man’s trustful acceptance of God’s gift, rising to absolute self–surrender, culminating in personal union with Christ, working within him as a spirit of new life.

3. The universality of this justification by faith,—a possibility offered to, because needed by, all.

4. This means of salvation given, not earned, nor to be earned; a free gift due to the free favour or grace of God.

5. The object of this faith, the source of this possibility of salvation, the life and death of Christ, as being (i.) a redemption—that is, a ransom of mankind from the triple bondage of the law, of sin, and of punishment; (ii.) a propitiatory victim,116—not (except by a rude, imperfect, and most misleading anthropomorphism) asregardsGod, but from the finite and imperfect standpoint of man; and therefore the Apostle adds that Christ becomes such tous by means of faith is His blood.

6. The reason for this,—the manifestation of God’s righteousness, which might otherwise have been called in question, because of the prætermission of past sins.

7. The end to be attained,—that, in perfect consistency with justice, God might justify all whose new life had its root in faith.

Boasting then is impossible, since merit is non–existent. By worksit is unattainable; by the very conception of faith it is excluded. This holds true alike for Jew and Pagan, and Justification is God’s free gift to man, as man117 because He is One, and the God alike of Jews and Gentiles. To the Jew faith is the source, to the Gentile the instrument of this justification.118

But here another objection has to be combated. The Jew might say, “By this faith of yours you are nullifying the Law”—meaning by the Law the whole Mosaic dispensation, and generally the Old Testament as containing the history of the covenant people. On the contrary, St. Paul replies, I am establishing it on a firmer basis;119 for I am exhibiting it in its true position, manifesting it in its true relations; showing it to be the divinely–necessary part of a greater system; adding to the depth of its spirituality, rendering possible the cheerful obedience to its requirements; indicating its divine fulfilment. I am showing that the consciousness of sin which came by the Law is the indispensable preparation for the reception of grace. Let us begin at the very beginning. Let us go back from Moses even to Abraham. What did he, our father, gain by works?120 By his works he gained nothing before God, as St. Paul proves by the verse that “He believed God, and it was imputed to him for righteousness.”121 That word “imputed” repeated eleven times in the chapter, is the keynote of the entire passage, and is one of very primary importance in the argument with the Jews, who held that Abraham obeyed the Law before it was given.122 To us, perhaps, it is of secondary importance, since the Apostle did not derive his views from these considerations, but discovered the truths revealed to him in passages which, until he thus applied them, would not have been seen to involve this deeper significance. It required, as De Wette says, no small penetration thus to unite the climax of religious development with the historic point at which the series of religious developments began. To a worker, he argues, the pay is not “imputed”; as a favour, but paidas a debt; but Abraham’s faith was “imputed”; to him for righteousness, just as it is to all who believe on Him who justifies the ungodly. This truth David also indicates when he speaks of the blessedness of the man to whom God imputethrighteousness, or, which comes to the same thing, “does not impute sin.” Now this imputation can have nothing to do with circumcision, because the phrase is used at a time before Abraham was circumcised, and circumcision was only a sign123 of the righteousness imputed to him because of his faith, that he might be regarded as “the father of the faithful,” whether they be circumcised or uncircumcised. Had the great promise to Abraham, on which all Jews relied, come to him by the Law? Not so, for two reasons. First, because the promise was long prior to the Law, and would have been nullified if it were made to depend on a subsequent law; and, secondly, because the Law causes the sense of wrongdoing,124 and so works wrath not promise. Hence, it was the strength of Abraham’s faith looking to God’s promise in spite of his own and Sarah’s age,125 which won him the imputed righteousness; and this was recorded for us because the faith, and the promise, and the paternity, are no mere historic circumstances, but have all of them a spiritual significance, full of blessedness for all who “believe on Him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was delivered up for our sins, and raised for our justification.”126

This, then, is the proof that the doctrine of Justification is not contrary to Scripture, and does not vilipend, but really establish the Law; and into the last verse are skilfully introduced the new conceptions of Christ’s death for our sin, and His resurrection to procure our imputed righteousness, which are further developed in the subsequent chapters.

But first, having proved his point, he dwells on its blessed consequences, which may be summed up in the two words Peace and Hope.

These are treated together. We have Peace,127 because through Christ we have our access into the free favour of God, and can exult not only in the hope of the future, but even in the afflictions of the present, which tend to hope because first they work endurance, then approved firmness.128 The certainty of our Hope is due to the love of God poured into our hearts by His Holy Spirit, and unmistakable to us, since, by a stretch of self–sacrifice unknown to humanity,129 Christ died for us, not because of any justice much less any goodness of ours, but while we were yet sinners and enemies. And since we have been reconciled to God by His death, much more shall we be saved by His life, so that our hope—founded on this reconciliation to God—may even acquire a tinge of exultation.130 Our Peace, then, is an immediate sentiment which requires no external proof; and our Hope is founded on the love of God assured to us in three ways—namely, by Christ’s death for us while we were yet enemies to God; on the strength to endure afflictions and see their blessed issue; and above all on union with Christ in death and life.131

And this universality of Sin, and universality of Justification, leads Paul to one of his great sketches of the religious history of humanity. To him that history was summed up in three great moments connected with the lives of Adam, Moses, and Christ, of which the mission of Moses was the least important. Those three names corresponded to three stages in the world’s religious history—Promise, Law, and Faith—of which the third is the realisation of the first. Adam was a type of Christ, and each stood as it were at the head of long lines of representatives. Each represents the principle of a whole æon. Adam’s first sin developed a principlefrom which none of his posterity could be free; and Christ introduced the possibility of a new and saving principle, the necessity for which had been made manifest by the dispensation of Moses. Here, however ever, as so often, the logical statement is incomplete and entangled, owing to the rush of the Apostle’s thoughts.132

“So then, asby one man sin entered into the world, and by sin death, and so death extended to all men on the ground that all sinned,”133 he probably meant to add as the second half of the parallel, “so, too, by one man came justification, and so life was offered to all.” The conclusion of the sentence was, however, displaced by the desire to meet a difficulty. He had said, “all sinned,” but some one might object, “How so? you have already told us that where there is no law there is no transgression; how, then, could men sin between Adam and Moses?” The answer is far from clear to understand. St. Paul might perhaps have referred to the law of nature, the transgression of which involved sin; but what he says is that “till the law, sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law.” If he had said, “sin is not brought into prominent self–consciousness,” his meaning would have been both clear and consistent, but the verb used (ἐλλογεῖται,) does not admit of this sense. Perhaps we may take the word popularly to imply that “it is not so fully reckoned or imputed,” a view which may find its illustration in our Lord’s remark that the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was less unpardonable than that of Chorazin and Bethsaida. It seems as if he meant to imply a distinction between “sin” in general, and the “transgression” of some special law or laws in particular.134 “Every sin,” as St. Thomas Aquinas says, “may be called a transgression in so far as it transgresses a natural law; but it is a more serious thing to transgress a law both natural and written. And so, when the law was given, transgression increased and deserved greater anger.” But the only proof which St. Paul offers that there wassin during this period is that, throughout it, death also reigned.135 When, however, he passes from this somewhat obscure reply (13, 14), to show how Adam was a type of Christ, his meaning again becomes clear. He dwells first on the points of difference (15–18), and then on those of resemblance (18, 19). The differences between the results caused by Adam and Christ are differences both qualitative and quantitative—both in degree and kind.

i. By Adam’s one transgression the many died, but the free grace of Christ abounded to the many in a far greater degree.136

ii. The condemnation of the race to death sprang from the single transgression of one; the sentence of acquittal was freely passed in spite of manytransgressions.

iii. By the transgression of Adam began the reign of death; far more shall all who are receiving the superabundance of grace of the gift of righteousness reign in life by the One, Jesus Christ. But with these differences there is also a parallel of deeper resemblance. One transgression (Adam’s sin), and one sentence of condemnation on all; one act of righteousness (Christ’s death), and one justification which gives life to all;—by the disobedience of the one,137 the many were made sinners;138 by the obedience of the one, the many shall be made righteous.139 Thus St. Paul states the origin of sin in this passage; but however he might have solved the antinomy of its generic necessity and individual origin, which he leaves unsolved, he would certainly have been ready to say with Pseudo–Baruch that “everyone of us is the Adam to his own soul.”

But here once more the question recurs, What then of the Law? Is that divine revelation to go for nothing? To that question St. Paul has already given one answer in the Epistle to the Galatians; he now gives another, which, till explained, might well have caused a shock. To the Galatians he had explained that the ante–Messianic period was the tirociniumof the world, and that during this period the Law was necessary as a pædagogic discipline. To the Romans he presents a new point of view, and shows that the Law was not merely a corrective system thrust in between the promise and its fulfilment, but an essential factor in the religious development of the world. It appears in the new aspect of a “power of sin,” in order that by creating the knowledge of sin it may mediate between sin and grace. The Law, he says, came in (the word he uses has an almost disparaging sound,140 which probably, however, he did not intend) “that transgression might multiply.” A terrible purpose indeed, and one which he subsequently explained (chap. 7.); but even here he at once hastens to add that where sin multiplied, grace superabounded, that as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness into life eternal, by Jesus Christ our Lord.141

The next chapter (6.) is of vast importance as stating an objection which might well be regarded as deadly, and as showing us how best to deal with an apparent paradox. If grace superabounds over sin, why should we not continue in sin? After first throwing from him the hateful inference with a “Perish the thought!” he proceeds in this chapter to prove, first in a mystic (6:1–15), and then in a more popular exposition (15–23), the moral consequences of his doctrine. In the first half of this chapter he uses the metaphor of death, in the latter the metaphor of emancipation, to illustrate the utter severance between the Christian and sin.

Ideally, theoretically, it should be needless to tell the Christian not to sin; he is dead to sin; the very name of “elect” or “saint” excludes the entire conception of sin, because the Christian is “IN CHRIST.” Those two words express the very quintessence of all that is most distinctive in St. Paul’s theology, and yet they are identical with the leading conception of St. John, who (we are asked to believe) rails at him in the Apocalypse as Balaam and Jezebel, a sham Jew, and a false apostle! That the two words “in Christ” sum up the distinctive secret, the revealed mystery of the Christian life, especially as taught by St. Paul and by St. John, will be obvious to any thoughtful reader. If this mystic union, to which both Apostles again and again recur, is expressed by St. Paul in the metaphors of stones in a temple of which Christ is the foundation,142 of members of a body of which Christ is the head,143 St. John records, and St. Paul alludes to, the metaphor of the branches and the vine,144 and both Apostles without any image again and again declare that the Christian life is a spiritual life, a supernatural life, and one which we can only live by faith in, by union with, by partaking of the life of the Son of God.145 With both Apostles Christ is our life, and apart from Him we have no true life.146 St. Paul, again, is fond of the metaphor of wearing Christ as a garment, putting on Christ, putting on the new man,147 reflecting Him with ever–brightening splendour.148 In fact, the words “in Christ” and “with Christ” are his most constantly recurrent phrases. We work for Him, we live in Him, we die in Him, we rise with Him, we are justified by Him. We are His sheep, His scholars, His soldiers, His servants.

The life of the Christian being hid with Christ in God, his death with Christ is a death to sin, his resurrection with Christ is a resurrection to life. The dipping under the waters of baptism is his union with Christ’s death; his rising out of the waters of baptism is a resurrection with Christ, and the birth to a new life. “What baptism is for the individual,” it has been said “Christ’s death is for the race.” If the Christian has become coalescent with Christ in His death, he shall also in His resurrection.149 The old sin–enslaved humanity is crucified with Christ, and the new man has been justified from sin, because he is dead to it, and lives in Christ. This is the ideal. Live up to it. Dethrone the sin that would rule over your frail nature. “Be not ever presenting your members as weapons of unrighteousness, but present yourselves once for all150 to God as alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. For sin shall not lord it over you; for ye are not under the Law, but under grace.”151 Die to sin, die to lust, die to your old vulgar, enslaved, corrupted self, die to the impulses of animal passion, and the self–assertion of worldly desire; for Christ too died, and you are one with Him in death, that you may be one in life. But these words, again, raise the ghost of the old objection. “Shall we then sin, since we are not under the Law, but under grace?” and this objection St. Paul again refutes by the same argument, clothed in a more obvious and less mystic illustration, in which he amplifies the proverb of Jesus, “Ye cannot serve two masters.” A man must either be a slave of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness.152 Thank God from that old past slavery of sin you were freed, when you submitted to the form of doctrine to which you were handed over by God’s providence; and then—if in condescension to your human weakness I may use an imperfect expression—you were enslaved to righteousness.153 The fruit of that former slavery was shame and misery; its end was death. This new enslavement to God is perfect freedom; its fruit is sanctification, its end eternal life. “For the wages of sin is death; but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”154

iv. At this point of his argument the Apostle felt it imperative to define more clearly, and establish more decisively, his view as to the position of the Law in the scheme of salvation. Apart from his discussion of this question in the Epistle to the Galatians, he has already, in this Epistle, made three incidental remarks on the subject, which might well horrify those Jews and Jewish Christians who were unfamiliar with his views. He has said—

1. That “by the works of the Law shall no flesh be justified before God: for by the Law is the full knowledge of sin” (3:20).

2. That “the Law came in as an addition that transgression might abound” (5:20).

3. That the Christian “is not under the Law, but under grace,” and that therefore sin is not to lord it over him (6:14).

Such statements as these, if left unsupported and unexplained, might well turn every Jewish reader from respectful inquiry into incredulous disgust; and he therefore proceeds to the difficult task of justifying his views.

The task was difficult because he has to prove scripturally and dialectically the truths at which he had arrived by a wholly different method. The central point of his own conviction was that which runs through the Epistle to the Galatians,155 that if salvation was to be earned by “doing”—if the Law was sufficient for justification—then Christ’s death was needless and vain. If he were right in his absolute conviction that only by faith in the blood of Christ are we accounted righteous before God, then clearly the Law stood condemned of incapacity to produce this result. Now by the Law St. Paul meant the wholeMosaic Law, and there is not in him a single trace of any distinction between the degree of sacredness in the ceremonial and the moral portion of it. If there had been, he might perhaps have adopted the luminous principle of the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, and shown that the Law was only abrogated by the completeness of its fulfilment; that its inefficiency only proves its typical character; and that the type disappeared in the fulness of the antitype, as a star is lost in the brightness of the sun. This method of allegory was by no means unfamiliar to St. Paul; he not only adopts it freely,156 but must have learnt it as no small element of his Rabbinic training in the school of Gamaliel. But, on the one hand, this attribution of a spiritual depth and mystery to every part of the ceremonial Law would have only tended to its glorification in the minds of Judaisers who had not yet learnt its abrogation; and on the other hand, it was not in this way that the relation of the Law to the Gospel had specially presented itself to the mind of Paul. The typical relation of the one to the other was real, and to dwell upon it would, no doubt, have made St. Paul’s arguments “less abrupt and less oppressive to the consciousness of the Jews;”157 but it would also have made them less effective for the emancipation of the Church and the world. The Law must be deposed, as it were, from its long primacy in the minds of the Jews, into that negative, supplementary, secondary, inefficient position which alone belonged to it, before it could with any prudence be reinstalled into a position of reflected honour. It had only a subordinate, provisional importance; it was only introduced per accidens. Its object was pædagogic, not final. St. Paul’s reasoning might inflict pain, but the pain which he inflicted was necessary and healing; and it was well for the Jews and for the world that, while he strove to make his arguments acceptable by stating them in a tone as conciliatory as possible, he did not strive to break the shock of them by any unfaithful weakening of their intrinsic force.

i. His first statement had been that the Law could not justify.158 That it could not justify he saw at once, because had it been adequate to do so, then the death of Christ would have been superfluous. But why was it that the Law was thus inefficacious? St. Paul rather indicates than clearly states the reason in the next chapter (8). It is because the Law, as regards its form, is external; it is a command from without; it is a letter which denounces sentence of death on its violators;159 it has no sympathy wherewith to touch the heart; it has no power whereby to sway the will. “Spiritual” in one sense it is, because it is “holy, just, and good;” but it is in no sense a “quickening spirit,” and therefore can impart no life. And why? Simply because it is met, opposed, defeated by a strong counter–principle of man’s being—the dominion of sin in the flesh. It was “weak through the flesh”—that is, through the sensuous principle which dominates the whole man in body and soul.160 In the human spirit, Paul perceived a moral spontaneity to good; in the flesh, a moral spontaneity to evil; and from these different elements results “the dualism of antagonistic moral principles.”161 Man’s natural self–will resists the Divine determination; the subjective will is too strong for the objective command. Even if man could obey a part of the Law he could not be justified, because the Law laid a curse on him who did not meet all its requirements, which the moral consciousness knew that it could not do.162

ii. But St. Paul’s second proposition—that the Law multiplied transgressions163—sounded almost terribly offensive. “The Law,” he had already said in the Galatians, was added until the coming of the promised seed, “forthe sake of transgressions.”164 To interpret this as meaning “a safeguard against transgressions”—though from another point of view, and in another order of relations, this might be true165—is in this place an absurdity, because St. Paul is proving the inability of the Law to perform this function at all effectually. It would, moreover, entirely contradict what he says—namely, that the object of the Law was the multiplicationof transgressions. Apart from the Law, there may indeed be “sin” (ἁμαρτία), although, not being brought into the light of self–consciousness, man is not aware of it (Rom. 5:13; 7:7); but he has already told us that there is not “transgression” (4:15), and there is not “imputation” (5:13), and man lives in a state of relative innocence, little pained by the existence of objective evil.166 It was, therefore, St. Paul’s painful and difficult task to sever the Law finally from all direct connexion with salvation, by showing that, theologically considered—and this was the point which to the Jew would sound so paradoxical and so wounding— God had expressly designed it, not for the prevention of sin, and the effecting of righteousness, but for the increaseof sin,andtheworkingofwrath.167 It multipliedsin, because, by a psychological fact, which we cannot explain, but which St. Paul here exhibits with marvellous insight into human nature, the very existence of a commandment acts as an incitement to its violation (“Permissum fit vile nefas”); and it worked wrath by forcing all sin into prominent self–consciousness,168 and thus making it the source of acute misery; by bringing home to the conscience that sense of guilt which is the feeling of disharmony with God; by darkening life with the shadows of dread and self–contempt; by creating the sense of moral death, and by giving to physical death its deadliest sting.169

iii. The third proposition—that “we are not under the Law, but under grace”170—has been already sufficiently illustrated; and it must be borne in mind that the object of St. Paul throughout has been to show that the true theological position of the Law—its true position, that is, in the Divine œconomy of salvation—is to come in between sin and grace, to be an impulse in the process of salvation. He has already shown this, historically and exegetically, in the fifth chapter, as also in Gal. 3., by insisting on the fact that the Law, as a supplementary ordinance,171 cannot disannul a free promise which was prior to it by 430 years, and which had been sanctioned by an oath. The Law, then, shows (1) the impossibility of any other way of obtaining the fulfilment of the promise, except that of free favour; and (2) the impossibility of regarding this promise as a debt (ὀφείλημα) when it was a free gift. In this point of view the Law fulfils the function of driving man to seek that justification which is possible by faith alone. Objectivelyand historically, therefore, the history of man may be regarded in four phases—Sin, Promise, Law, Grace—Adam, Abraham, Moses, Christ; subjectivelyand individually, also in four phases—relative innocence, awakened consciousness, imputable transgression, free justification. The one is the Divine, the other is the human side of one and the same process; and both find their illustration, though each independently of the other, in the theology of St. Paul.172

And if it be asserted, by way of modern objection to this theology, and to St. Paul’s methods of argument and exegesis, that they suggest multitudes of difficulties; that they pour new wine into old wine–skins, which burst under its fermentation; that they involve a mysticising idealisation of 1,500 years of history and of the plain literal intention of large portions of the Old and New Testament Scriptures; that Moses would have been as horrified to be told by St. Paul that the object of his Law was only to multiply transgression, and intensify the felt heinousness of sin, as he is said to have been when in vision he saw Rabbi Akhibha imputing to him a thousand rules which he had never sanctioned; that the Law was obviously given with the intention that it should be obeyed, not with the intention that it should be broken; that St. Paul himself has spoken in this very Epistle of “doers of the Law being justified,” and of “works of the Law,” and of “working good,” and of a recompense for it,173 and of “reaping what we have sown;”174 that he has in every one of his Epistles urged the necessity of moral duties, not as an ineritableresultof that union with Christ which is the Christian’s life, but as things after which Christians should strive, and for the fulfilment of which they should train themselves with severe effort;175 and that in his Pastoral Epistles these moral considerations, as in the Epistles of St. Peter and St. James, seem to have come into the foreground,176 while the high theological verities seem to have melted farther into the distance—if these objections be urged, as they often have been urged, the answers to them are likewise manifold. We have not the smallest temptation to ignore the difficulties, though it would be easy by separate examination to show that to state them thus is to shift their true perspective. As regards St. Paul’s style of argument, those who see in it a falsification of Scripture, a treacherous dealing with the Word of God, which St. Paul expressly repudiates,177 should consider whether they too may not be intellectually darkened by suspicious narrowness and ignorant prepossessions.178 St. Paul regarded the Scripture as the irrefragable Word of God, and yet, even when he seems to be attaching to mere words and sounds a “talismanic value,” he never allows the letter of Scripture to becloud the illumination (φωτισμὸς) of spiritual enlightenment.179 Even when he seemed to have the whole Pentateuch against him, he never suffered the outward expression to enthral the emancipated idea. He knew well that one word of God cannot contradict another, and his allegorising and spiritualising methods—(which, in one form or other, are absolutely essential, since the Law speaks in the tongue of the sons of men and human language is at the best but an asymptote to thought)—are not made the vehicle of mechanical inference or individual caprice, but are used in support of formative truths, of fruitful ideas, of spiritual convictions, of direct revelations, which are as the Eternal Temple, built within the temporary scaffolding of abrogated dispensations. In this way of dealing with Scripture he was indeed regarded as a blasphemer by a Pharisaism which was at once unenlightened and unloving; but he was a direct successor of the Prophets, who dealt in a spirit of sacred independence with earlier revelations,180 and with their mantle he had caught a double portion of their spirit. He felt that the truths his opponents characterised as “temerities” and “blasphemies” were as holy as the Trisagion of the Seraphim; that his “apostasy from Moses”181 was due to a reverence for him far deeper than that of his upholders, and that there was an immemorial, nay, even an eternal validity, in the most extreme of his asserted innovations.

And as for apparent contradictions, St. Paul, like all great thinkers, was very careless of them. It is even doubtful whether they were distinctly present to his mind. He knew that the predestinations of the Infinite cannot be thrust away—as though they were ponderable dust inurned in the Columbaria—in the systems of the finite. He knew that in Divine as well as in human truths there are certain antinomies, irreconcilable by the mere understanding, and yet perfectly capable of being fused into unity by the divinely enlightened reason, or, as he would have phrased it, by the spirit of man which has been mystically united with the Spirit of Christ. As a scheme, as a system, as a theory of salvation—abstractly considered, ideally treated— he knew that his line of argument was true, and that his exposition of the Divine purpose was irrefragable, because he knew that he had received it neither from man, nor by any man,182 but by the will of God. But there is a difference between the ideal and the actual—between the same truths regarded in their theological bearing as parts of one vast philosophy of the plan of salvation, and stated in everyday language in their immediate bearing upon the common facts of life. In the language of strict and accurate theology, to talk of the “merit” of works, and the “reward” of works, or even the possibility of “good” works, was erroneous; but yet—without any of such Protestant after–thoughts as that these works are the fruits of unconscious faith, or that without this faith they cannot in any sense be good, and without dreaming of any collision with what he says elsewhere, and untroubled by any attempt to reconcile his statements with the doctrine of original sin—he could and did talk quite freely about “Gentiles doing by nature the things of the Law,” and says that “the doer of the Law shall be justified,” and that God will render to every man according to his works.183 St. Paul would probably have treated with contempt, as a mere carping criticism, which allowed no room for common sense in dealing with the truths of revelation, any attempt to show that in such passages—both on this and on other subjects—he appears to contradict himself.184 He would very briefly, and with profound indifference, have contented himself with saying that his remarks in these passages are not in pari materiâ.185 He is not there speaking or thinking at all of the doctrine of redemption. He is there talking about “the justification of the Law,” which is a very different thing from “the justification by faith.” He is there using general language, altogether irrespective of the Gospel. Protestant commentators with all their elaborate and varying theories—that in these works faith is included as the highest work;186 that they are perfected in faith;187 that “works will be adduced in the day of judgment, not as meriting salvation, but as proofs and results of faith;”188 that “the imperfect works of the sanctified will be rewarded, not on the ground of the Law, but on the ground of grace;”189 that he was mentally referring to a “prevenient grace” over the Gentile world, and so on—are doubtless dogmatically right, but they are far more anxious to save St. Paul’s orthodoxy and consistency than he would have been himself. It is at least doubtful whether such considerations were consciously present to his mind. He would have held it enough to reply that, in these passages, he was only applying the current language of morality to the concrete relations of actual life;190 and that “the doctrine of justification cannot conflict with the doctrine of God’s righteousness by virtue of which He will reward every man according to his works.”191 When St. Paul was using the language of accurate theology, he would have shown the nullity of righteousness by works. But, in any case, he would have thought far more highly of the possibility of such righteousness than of the righteousness of dogmatic orthodoxy, or the righteousness of the letter; the righteousness of the jealous heresy–hunter, or the righteousness of the religious partisan.192

Lastly, it will be seen how little St. Paul is troubled by the apparent paradoxes which result from the doctrines which he enforces. By those who manipulated truth to suit their own parties and purposes: by those who huckstered the Word of Life; by those who pushed truths into extravagant inferences, and then condemned them on the ground of their possible misapplication—his doctrines were denounced as “dangerous;” and we know as a fact that, even in his own lifetime, what he taught was made a handle for evil doctrine,193 and was subjected to perilous perversions.194 When such arguments as these were urged against him, St. Paul treated them with entire disdain. Truth may be wrested, truth may be distorted, truth may be made an instrument of self–destruction—but truth is truth, and can take care of itself, and needs no “lying for God” to serve as its buttress.195 The doctrine of free grace might be, and was, quoted in the cause of antinomianism, and degraded into a justification of sensuality. The predominance of grace over sin was twisted into a reason for doing evil that good might come. The hope of future forgiveness was pleaded as a ground for continuing in sin. Well, let it be so. The ocean of truth did not cease to be an ocean because here and there a muddy river of error flowed stealthily in its tides. In answer to the moral perversity which abused truth into an occasion of wickedness, St. Paul thought it sufficient to appeal to the right feeling of mankind. If a man chooses to pervert a Divine and gracious doctrine into a “dangerous downfall,” he does so at his own peril. Evil inferences St. Paul merely repudiates with a “God for bid!”196—of malignant misinterpreters he thought it enough to say that “their condemnation was just!”197

After these preliminary considerations we are in a position to proceed uninterruptedly with our sketch of the Epistle, since we are now in possession of its main conceptions. Proceeding then to a further expansion of his views respecting the Law, and speaking (chap. 7) to those who know it, the Apostle further enforces the metaphor that the Christian is dead to his past moral condition, and has arisen to a new one. A woman whose husband is dead is free to marry again; we are dead to the Law, and are therefore free to be united to Christ. Obviously the mere passing illustration must not be pressed, because if used as more than an illustration it is doubly incomplete— incomplete because the word “dead” is here used in two quite different senses; and because, to make the analogy at all perfect, the Law ought to have died to us, and not we to the Law. But St. Paul merely makes a cursory use of the illustration to indicate that the new life of the Christian involves totally new relationships;198 that death naturally ends all legal obligations; and that our connexion with the risen Christ is so close that it may be compared to a conjugal union. Hence our whole past condition, alike in its character and its results, is changed, and a new Law has risen from the dead with our new life—a Law which we must serve in the newness of the spirit, not in the oldness of the letter. He who is dead to sin is dead to the Law, because the Law can only reign so long as sin reigns, and because Christ in His crucified body has destroyed the body of sin.199

But St. Paul is conscious that in more than one passage he has placed the Law and Sin in a juxtaposition which would well cause the very deepest offence. To show his meaning he enters on a psychological study, of which the extreme value has always been recognised entirely apart from its place in the scheme of theology. Here he writes as it were with his very heart’s blood; he dips his pen in his inmost experience. He is not here dealing with the ideal or with the abstract, but with the sternest facts of actual daily life. There have been endless discussions as to whether he is speaking of himself or of others; whether he has in view the regenerate or the unregenerate man. Let even good men look into their own hearts and answer. Ideally, the Christian is absolutely one with Christ, and dead to sin; in reality, as again and again St. Paul implies even of himself, his life is a warfare in which there is no discharge. There is an Adam and a Christ in each of us. “The angel has us by the hand, and the serpent by the heart.” The old Adam is too strong for young Melancthon.200 Here, then, he explains, from a knowledge of his own heart, confirmed by the knowledge of every heart, that the Law, though not the causeof sin, is yet the occasionof it; and that there are in every human being two laws—that is, two opposing tendencies—which sway him from time to time, and in greater or less degree in opposite directions. And in this way he wrote an epitome of the soul’s progress. When we have once realised that the “I” of the passage is used in different senses—sometimes of the flesh, the lower nature, in the contemplation of which St. Paul could speak of himself as the chief of sinners; sometimes of the higher nature, which can rise to those full heights of spiritual life which he has been recently contemplating; sometimes generically of himself as a member of the human race—it is then easy to follow his history of the soul.

The Law is not sin—Heaven forbid!—but it provokes disobedience,201 and it creates the consciousness of sin. Without it there is sin indeed, but it is dead; in other words, it is latent and unrecognised. That is the age of fancied innocence, of animal irreflective life, of a nakedness which is not ashamed. But it is a condition of “immoral tranquillity” which cannot be permanent; of misplaced confidence which causes many an aberration from duty. When the blind tendency of wrong becomes conscious of itself by collision with a direct command, then sin acquires fresh life at the expense of that misery and shame which is spiritual death.202 Thus sin, like Satan, disguises itself under the form of an angel of light, and seizes the opportunity furnished by the command which in itself is holy, just, and good,203 to utterly deceive and to slay me.204

“What?” one may ask, “did that which is good become death to me?” Nay, but sin bymeansof that which was good effected my death, because by means of the commandment sin’s exceeding sinfulness was dragged into recognition. How came this? It came out of the struggle of the higher and the lower elements of our being; out of the contest between my fleshen and servile nature205 and the Law’s spirituality of origin,—the result of which is that I am two men in one, and live two lives in one, not doing what I desire, and doing what I detest. In me—that is, in my flesh—dwelleth no good thing; but I am not my flesh. I identify my own individuality with that higher nature which wills what is noble, but is too often defeated by the indwelling impulses of sin.206 My true self, my inward man,207 delights in the law of God; but my spirit, my intellect and my reason are in constant warfare with another law— a sensual impulse of my fleshy nature—which often reduces me into the bondage of its prison house. Wretched duality of condition which makes my life a constant inconsistency! Wretched enchainment of a healthy, living organism to a decaying corpse! Who shall rescue me from these struggles of a disintegrated individuality?

“Thanks to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” It is a sign of the intensity of feeling with which he is writing that he characteristically omits to mention the very thing for which he thanks God. But the words “through Jesus Christ our Lord” sufficiently show that his gratitude is kindled by the conviction that the deliverance is possible—that the deliverance has been achieved.208 I, my very self—the human being within me209—serve with my mind the law of God. Through my weakness, my inconsistency, my imperfect faith, my imperfect union with Christ, I still serve with my flesh the law of sin;210 but that servitude is largely weakened, is practically broken. There is no condemnation for those who by personal union with Christ211 live in accordance with the Spirit. Sin is slavery and death; the Spirit is freedom and life. The Law was rendered impotent by the flesh, but God, by sending His own Son in the form of sinful flesh212 and as a sin–offering, condemned to death213 the victorious power of sin in the flesh, and so enabled us, by a spiritual life, to meet the otherwise impossible requirements of the Law. Our life is no longer under the dominion of the flesh, which obeys the law of sin, but of the spirit.214 The death of Christ has, so to speak, shifted the centre of gravity of our will. If Christ be in us, the body indeed is still liable to death because of sin, but the spirit,—our own spiritual life—(he does not say merely ‘contains the elements of life,’ but in his forcible manner)—is life, because of the righteousness implanted by the sanctifying Spirit of God. If that Spirit which raised Jesus from the dead dwell in us, He who raised Christ from the dead will also quicken us to full life, partially but progressively here, but triumphantly and finally beyond the grave.215 And even here, in a measure, we attain to the “life of the spirit.” Never, indeed, can we fulfil the wholeLaw (Gal. 3:10); but for the quantitative is substituted a qualitative fulfilment, and the “totality of the disposition contains in itself the totality of the Law.” In that stage life becomes life indeed. The “law of the spirit” is the “lawof thespiritoflifeinChristJesus.”

This, then, shows us the true law, and the final issue of our lives. If we are led by the Spirit of God we are the sons of God, and the spirit of fear becomes the spirit of sonship, and the cry of slavery the cry of confident appeal to a Father in heaven. Thus we become joint–heirs with Christ; and, therefore, to share His glory we must share His sufferings. The full glory of that sonship is to be ours beyond the grave, and in comparison with it the sufferings of this life are nothing. The life of all creation is now in anguish, in bondage, in corruption, yearning for a freedom which shall be revealed when we too have entered on the full glory of our inheritance as the children of God. We, though we have the first–fruits of the spirit, share in the groaning misery of nature, as it too shares in inarticulate sympathy with our impatient aspirations. We live, we are saved BY HOPE, and the very idea of Hope is the antithesis of present realisation.216

Hope is not possession, is not reality; it can but imply futurefruition; it is Faith in Christ directed to the future. But we have something more and better than Hope. We have the help in weakness, the intercession even in prayer that can find no utterance, of the Holy Spirit Himself. We know, too, that allthings work together for good to all them that love God and are called according to His purpose. He ends the Divine work that He begins. Election—predestination to conformity and brotherhood with Christ—vocation— justification—these four steps all follow, all must inevitably follow each other, and must end in glorification. So certain is this glorification, this entrance into the final fulness of sonship and salvation, that St. Paul—with one of those splendid flashes of rhetoric which, like all true rhetoric, come directly from the intensities of emotion, and have nothing to do with the technicalities of art—speaks of it in the same past tense which he has employed for every other stage in the process. Those whom He foreknew,217 predestined, called, justified—them He also glorified.

“What shall we then say to these things?” What, but that magnificent burst of confidence and rapture218 which we will not degrade by the name of peroration, because in St. Paul no such mere artificiality of construction is conceivable, but which fitly closes this long and intricate discussion, in which he has enunciated truths never formulated since the origin of the world, but never to be forgotten till its final conflagration. The subtleties of dialectic, the difficulties of polemical argument, the novelties of spiritualising exegesis, are concluded; and, firm in his own revealed conviction, he has urged upon the conviction of the world, and fixed in the conviction of Christians for ever, the deepest truths of the Gospel entrusted to his charge. What remains but to give full utterance to his sense of exultation in spite of earthly sufferings, and “to reduce doubt to absurdity” by a series of rapid, eager, triumphant questions, which force on the minds of his hearers but one irresistible answer? In spite of all the anguish that persecution can inflict, in spite of all the struggles which the rebellious flesh may cause, “we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us for a moment from God’s love manifested towards us in Christ Jesus our Lord.” In spite of failure, in spite of imperfection, our life is united with the life of Christ, our spirit quickened by the Spirit of Christ, and what have we to fear if all time, and all space, and all nature, and all the angels of heaven, and all the demons of hell, are utterly powerless to do us harm?