“Everything is foreseen, and free will is given. And the world is judged by grace, and everything is according to work.”—R. AKHIBHA in PirkeAbóth,iii. 24.
Ὁρᾷς ὅτι οὐ φύσεως οὐδὲ ὑλικῆς ἀνάγκης ἐστὶ τὸ εἶναι χρυσοῦν ἢ ὀστράκινον, ἀλλὰ τῆς ἡμετέρας προαιρέσεως.— CHRYS. ad2 Tim. 2:21.
“Reasoned high
Of Providence, foreknowledge, will and fate,
Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,
And found no end in wandering mazes lost.”—MILTON, ParadiseLost, ii.
“Soll ich dir die Gegend Zeigen
Musst du erst das Dach besteigen.”—GÖTHE.
WE now come to the three memorable chapters (ix., x., xi.) in which St. Paul faces the question which had, perhaps, led him to state to the Jews and Gentiles of Rome the very essence of his theology. He has told them “his Gospel”— that revealed message which he had to preach, and by virtue of which he was the Apostle of the Gentiles. He has shown that Jews and Gentiles were equally guilty, equally redeemed. The Redemption was achieved; but only by faith, in that sense of the word which he has so fully explained, could its blessings be appropriated. Alas! it was but too plain that while the Gentiles were accepting this great salvation, and pressing into the Kingdom of Heaven, the Jews were proudly holding aloof, and fatally relying on a system now abrogated, on privileges no longer exclusive. Their national hopes, their individual hopes, were alike based on a false foundation, which it has been the Apostle’s duty inexorably to overthrow. Their natural exclusiveness he meets by the unflinching principle that there is no favouritism with our Heavenly Father; he meets their attempts after a legal righteousness by proving to them that they, like the Gentiles, are sinners, that they cannot attain a legal righteousness, and that no such endeavour can make them just before God. Obviously he was thus brought face to face with a tragic fact and a terrible problem. The factwas that the Jews were being rejected, that the Gentiles were being received. Even thus early in the history of Christianity it had become but too plain that the Church of the future would be mainly a Church of Gentiles, that the Jewish element within it would become more and more insignificant, and could only exist by losing its Judaic distinctiveness. The problemwas, how could this be, in the face of those immemorial promises, in the light of that splendid history? Was God breaking His promises? Was God forgetting that they were “the seed of Abraham His servant, the children of Jacob whom He had chosen?”1 To this grave question there was (1) a theologic answer, and (2) an historic answer. (1) The theologic answer was—that acceptance and rejection are God’s absolute will, and in accordance with His predestined election to grace or wrath. (2) The historic answer was—that the rejection of the Jews was the natural result of their own obstinacy and hardness. The two answers might seem mutually irreconcilable; but St. Paul, strong in faith, in inspiration, in sincerity, never shrinks from the seeming oppositions of an eternal para dox. He often gives statements of truth regarded from different aspects, without any attempt to show that they are, to a higher reason than that of man, complementary, not (as they appear) contradictory, of each other. Predestination is a certain truth of reason and of revelation; free will is a certain truth of revelation and of experience. They are both true, yet they seem mutually exclusive, mutually contradictory. The differences between Supralapsarians and Sublapsarians do not really touch the question; God’s foreknowledge is always recognised, but in no way does it solve the difficulty of the absolute decree. If we say that St. Paul is here mainly arguing about great masses of men, about men in nations, and the difference between Jews and Gentiles, that is partially true; but be most definitely recognises the case of individuals also, and God is the God not only of nations, but of individuals. In any case, this sacrifice of the individual to the interests of the mass would be but a thrusting of the difficulty a little further back. The thought that many, though Edomites, will be saved, and many, though of Israel, will be lost, may make the antenatal predilection for Israel and detestation of Esau less startling to us, and it is quite legitimate exegetically to soften, by the known peculiarities of Semitic idiom, the painful harshness of the latter term. But even then we are confronted with the predestined hardening of Pharaoh’s heart. St. Paul recognises—all Scripture recognises—the naturalness of the cry of the human soul; but the remorseless logic of a theology which is forced to reason at all about the Divine prescience can only smite down the pride of finite arguments with the iron rod of revealed mysteries. Man is but clay in the potter’s hands. God is omnipotent; God is omniscient; yet evil exists, and there is sin, and there is death, and after death the judgment; and sin is freely forgiven, and yet we shall receive the things done in the body, and be judged according to our works. All things end in a mystery, and all mysteries resolve themselves into one—the existence of evil. But, happily, this mystery need in no way oppress us, for it is lost in the Plenitude of God. The explanation of it has practically nothing to do with us. It lies in a region wholly apart from the facts of common life. When St. Paul tells us “that it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth,” he is dealing with one order of transcendental ideas; but when he comes to the common facts of Christian life, he bids us will, and he bids us run, and he bids us work out our own salvation with fear and trembling; exactly as he tells us that justification is of faith alone, and not of works, and yet constantly urges us to good works, and tells us that God will reward every man according to his works.2 Beyond this we cannot get. “Decretum horribile fateor,” said Calvin, “at tamen verum.” Theology must illustrate by crushing analogies its irreversible decrees, but it cannot touch the sphere of practical experience, or weaken the exhortations of Christian morality. God predestines; man is free. How this is we cannot say; but soit is. St. Paul makes no attempt to reconcile the two positions. “Neither here nor anywhere else does he feel called upon to deal with speculative extremes. And in whatever way the question be speculatively adjusted, absolute dependence and moral self–determination are both involved in the immediate Christian self–consciousness.”3 The finite cannot reduce the infinite to conditions, or express by syllogisms the mutual relations of the two. The truths must be stated, when there is need to state them, although each of them belongs to separate orders of ideas. Since they cannot be reconciled, they must be left side by side. It is an inevitable necessity, implied throughout all Scripture, that, as regards such questions, the sphere of dogma and the sphere of homily should often be regarded as though they were practically separate from each other, though in reality they intersect each other. And the reason of this is that both are enclosed in the circumference of a sphere by far more vast—that sphere of the Divine, of which for us the centre is everywhere, and the circumference, not indeed “nowhere,” but immeasurably beyond our ken.4 This is one comfort. And again, just as St. Paul refuses to find the substantial essence of morality anywhere but in the inmost disposition, so he does away with the individualegoby raising it to the universal ego—to that humanity which is present, and is identified with itself, in every separate individual.5 It is unquestionable that he categorically asserts, and that without limitations, the redemption of the universe and of the race.6 In that thought, and in the thought of God’s infinite love, lies the gleam of light in the saddest destinies or the most perplexed enigmas of the individual. The logical conclusions of an exaggerated dogmatism are rectified by the unchangeable certainties of moral conviction, and the inspired hopes of a child–like love.
“Ah, truly,” says Reuss,7 “if the last word of the Christian revelation is contained in the image of the potter and the clay, it is a bitter derision of all the deep needs and legitimate desires of a soul aspiring towards its God. This would be at once a satire of reason upon herself, and the suicide of revelation.” But it is neither the lastword, nor the onlyword; nor has it any immediate observable bearing on the concrete development of our lives. It is not the onlyword, because in nine–tenths of Scripture it is as wholly excluded from the sphere of revelation as though it had been never revealed at all; and it is not the last word, because throughout the whole of Scripture, and nowhere more than in the writings of the very Apostle who has faced this problem with the most heroic inflexibility, we see bright glimpses of something beyond. How little we were intended to draw logical conclusions from the metaphor, is shown by the fact that we are living souls, not dead clay; and St. Paul elsewhere recognised a power, both within and without our beings, by which, as by an omnipotent alchemy, mean vessels can become precious, and vessels of earthenware be transmuted into vessels of gold.8 Vessels fitted for destruction may be borne with much long–suffering. Apparent loss is made the immediate instrument of wider gain. Partial rejection is to pave the way for universal acceptance. God wills the salvation of all.9 Where sin abounds, there grace superabounds.10 God giveth freely to all, and freely calleth all, and His gifts and calling are without repentance. Israel is rejected, Israel in part is hardened, yet “all Israel shall be saved.”11 “God shut up all into disobedience, that He might pity all.”12 The duality of election resolves itself into the higher unity of an all–embracing counsel of favour; and the sin of man, even through the long Divine œconomy of the æons, is seen to be but a moment in the process towards that absolute end of salvation, which is described as the time when God shall be “all things in all things,” and therefore in all men; and when the whole groaning and travailing creation shall be emancipated into “the freedom of the glory of the children of God.”13 If disobedience has been universal, so too is mercy; and Divine mercy is stronger and wider, and more infinite and more eternal, than human sin. Here, too, there is an antinomy. St. Paul recognises such a thing as “perdition;” there are beings who are called “the perishing.”14 There are warnings of terrible significance in Scripture and in experience. But may we not follow the example of St. Paul, who quite incontestably dwells by preference upon the wide prospect of infinite felicity; who seems always lost in the contemplation of the final triumph of all good? However awful may be the future retribution of sinful lives, we still cannot set aside—what true Christian would wish to set aside?—the Scriptures, which say that “as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive;” that all things tend “unto God,” as all things are from Him and by Him;15 that Christ shall reign until He hath put all enemies under His feet, and that the last which shall be destroyed is death.16
Let us, then, see more in detail how the Apostle deals with a fact so shocking to every Jew as the deliberate rejection of Israel from every shadow of special privilege in the kingdom of God; let us see how he proves a doctrine against which, at first sight, it might well have seemed that the greater part of the Old Testament and 1,500 years of history were alike arrayed.
It should be observed that in his most impassioned polemic he always unites a perfect conciliatoriness of tone with an absolute rigidity of statement. If he must give offence, he is ready to give offence to any extent, so far as the offence must inevitably spring from the truth which it is his sacred duty to proclaim. Doubtless, too, much that he said might be perverted to evil results; be it so. There are some who abuse to evil purposes God’s own sunlight, and who turn the doctrine of forgiveness into a curse. Are we to quench His sunlight? are we to say that He does not forgive? Some Jews were, doubtless, dangerously shaken in all their convictions by the proclamation of the Gospel, as some Romanists were by the truths of the Reformation. Is error to be immortal because its eradication is painful? Is the mandrake to grow, because its roots shriek when they are torn out of the ground? Or is it not better, as St. Gregory the Great said, that a scandal should be created than that truth should be suppressed? There is no style of objection to the proclamation of a new or a forgotten truth which is so false, so faithless, and so futile, as the plea that it is “dangerous.” But one duty is incumbent on all who teach what they believe to be the truths of God. It is that they should state them with all possible candour, courtesy, forbearance, considerateness. The controversial method of St. Paul furnishes the most striking contrast to that of religious controversy in almost every age. It is as different as anything can be from the reckless invective of a Jerome or of a Luther. It bears no relation at all to the unscrupulousness of a worldly ecclesiasticism. It is removed by the very utmost extreme of distance from the malice of a party criticism, and the Pharisaism of a loveless creed.
Thus, though he knows that what he has to enforce will be most unpalatable to the Jews, and though he knows how virulently they hate him, how continuously they have thwarted his teaching and persecuted his life, he begins with an expression of love to them so tender and so intense, that theologians little accustomed to an illimitable unselfishness felt it incumbent upon them to explain it away.
“I say the truth in Christ, I lie not, my conscience bearing me witness in the Holy Spirit, that I have great grief and incessant anguish in my heart;” and then, in the intensity of his emotion, he omits to state the cause of his grief, because it is sufficiently explained by what follows and what has gone before. It is grief at the thought that Israel should be hardening their hearts against the Gospel. “For I could have wished my own self to be anathema from Christ17 on behalf of my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh, seeing that they are Israelites, whose is the adoption,18 and the Shechinah,19 and the covenants, and the legislation, and the ritual, and the promises, whose are the fathers, and of whom is Christ, according to the flesh, who is over all—God blessed for ever. Amen.”20 On his solemn appeal to the fact of his readiness even to abandon all hopes of salvation if thereby he could save his brethren, I think it only necessary to say that the very form in which it is expressed shows his sense that such a wish is by the very nature of things impossible. Further explanation is superfluous to those who feel how natural, how possible, is the desire for even this vast self–sacrifice to the great heart of a Moses or a Paul.
“Not, however, as though the Word of God has failed.”21 This is the point which St. Paul has to prove, and he does it by showing that God’s gifts are matters of such free choice that the Jew cannot put forward any exclusive claim to their monopoly.
In fact, all who are Jews naturally are not Jews spiritually—are not, therefore, in any true sense heirs of the promise. To be of the seed of Abraham is nothing in itself. Abraham had many sons, but only one of them, the son of Sarah, was recognised in the promise.22
Not only so, but even of the two sons of the son of promise one was utterly rejected; and so completely was this a matter of choice, and so entirely was it independent of merit, that before there could be any question of merit, even in the womb, the elder was rejected to servitude, the younger chosen for dominion. And this is stated in the strongest way by the prophet Malachi—“Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.”23
“Is God unjust then?” To a natural logic the question might seem very excusable, but St. Paul simply puts it aside as irrelevant and impossible, while he re–states the fact which suggests it by quoting as decisive two passages of Scripture.24 God has an absolute right to lovewhom He will; for He says to Moses, “Whomsoever I pity, him I will pity; and whomsoever I compassionate, him I will compassionate;” so that pity is independent of human will or effort. And God has an absolute right to hatewhom He will; for Scripture says to Pharaoh, “For this very purpose I raised thee up, to display in thee my power, and that my name may be proclaimed in all the earth.”25
So then God pities, and God hardens, whom He will.
Again, the natural question presents itself—“Why does He then blame? If wickedness be the result of Divine Will, what becomes of moral responsibility?”
In the first place, Paul implies that the question is absurd. Who are you, that you can call God to account? No matter what becomes of moral responsibility, it does not at any rate affect God’s decree. Man is but passive clay in the Potter’s hands; He can mould it as He will.26
But Paul would not thus merely smite down the timid questioning of sinners by the arbitrary irresponsibility of Infinite Power. He gives a gleam of hope; he sheds over the ultimate Divine purposes a flash of insight. He asks a question which implies a large and glorious answer, and the very form of the question shows how little he desires to dwell on the unpractical insoluble mysteries of Divine reprobation.27
What if God, willing to display His wrath, and to make known His power—(he will not say, “created vessels of wrath,” or “prepared them for destruction,” but, swerving from a conclusion too terrible for the wisest)—“enduredin muchlong–sufferingvessels of wrath fitted for destruction …? And what if He did this that He might also make known the riches of His glory towards the vessels of mercy which He before prepared for glory …?” What if even those decrees which seemed the harshest were but steps towards an ultimate good? … By that blessed purpose we profit, whom God called both out of the Jews and out of the Gentiles. This calling is illustrated by the language of two passages of Hosea,28 in which the prophet calls his son and daughter Lo–ammi and Lo–ruhamah (Not–my–people and Not–pitied) because of the rejection of Israel, but at the same time prophesies the day when they shall again be His people, and He their God:—and by two passages of Isaiah29 in which he at once prophesies the rejection of the mass of Israel and the preservation of a remnant.30
Having thus established the fact on Scriptural authority, what is the conclusion? Must it not be that—so entirely is election a matter of God’s free grace—the Gentiles, though they did not pursue righteousness, yet laid hold of justification by faith; and that the Jews, though they did pursue a legal righteousness, have not attained to justification? How can such a strange anomaly be explained? Whatever may be the working of Divine election, humanly speaking, their rejection is the fault of the Jews. They chose to aim at an impossible justification by works, and rejected the justification by faith. Again St. Paul refers to Isaiah in support of his views.31 They stumbled at Christ. To them, as to all believers, He might have been a firm rock of foundation; they made Him a stone of offence.32 The desire of his heart, his prayer to God, is for their salvation. But their religious zeal has taken an ignorant direction. They are aiming at justification by works, and therefore will not accept God’s method, which is justification by faith.33
In the path of works they cannot succeed, for the Law finds its sole end, and aim, and fulfilment in Christ,34 and through Him alone is justification possible. Even these truths the Apostle finds in Scripture, or illustrates by Scriptural quotations. He contrasts the statement of Moses, that he who obeyed the ordinances of the Law should live by them,35 with those other words which he puts into the mouth of Justification personified, “Say not in thine heart who shall ascend into heaven, or who shall descend into the abyss, but the word is very nigh thee in thy mouth and in thy heart,” which (being used originally of the Law) he explains of the nearness and accessibility of the Gospel which was now being preached, and which was summed up in the confession and belief in Him as a risen Saviour. This is again supported by two quotations in almost the same words—one from Isaiah (28:16), “Every one that believeth on Him shall not be ashamed;” and one from Joel (2:32), “Every one that calleth on the name of the Lord shall be saved”—and the “every one” of course includes the Gentile no less than the Jew.36
But had the Jews enjoyed a real opportunity of hearing the Gospel? In a series of questions, subordinated to each other with great rhetorical beauty, St. Paul shows that each necessary step has been fulfilled—the hearing, the preachers, the mission of those whose feet were beautiful upon the mountains, and who preach the glad tidings of peace; but, alas! the faithhad been wanting, and, therefore, also the calling upon God. For all had not hearkened to the Gospel. It was not for want of hearing, for in accordance with prophecy (Ps. 19:4) the words of the preachers had gone out to all the world; but it was for want of faith, and this, too, had been prophesied, since Isaiah said, “Who believed our preaching?” Nor, again, was it for want of warning. Moses (Deut. 32:21) had told them ages ago that God would stir up their jealousy and kindle their anger by means of those Gentiles whom in their exclusive arrogance they despised as “no nation;” and Isaiah (65:1, 2) says with daring energy, “I was found by such as sought me not, I became manifest to such as inquire not after me,” whereas to Israel he saith, “The whole day long I outspread my hands to a disobedient and antagonistic people.”37
Thus, with quotation after quotation—there are nine in this chapter alone, drawn chiefly from Deuteronomy, Isaiah, and the Psalms—does St. Paul state his conviction as to the present rejection of the Gospel by his own nation; while he tries to soften the bitter rage which it was calculated to arouse both against himself and against his doctrine, by stating it in words which would add tenfold authority to the dialectical arguments into which they are enwoven. But having thus established two very painful, and at first sight opposing truths—namely, that the Jews were being deprived of all exclusive privileges by the decree of God (ix.), and that this forfeiture was due to their own culpable disbelief (x.)—he now enters on the gladder and nobler task of explaining how these sad truths are robbed of their worst sting, when we recognise that they are but the partial and transient phenomena incidental to the evolution of a blessed, universal, and eternal scheme.
“I ask, then, did God reject His people? Away with the thought! for at worst the rejection is but partial.” Of this he offers himself as a proof, being as he is “an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin;” and he then quotes the analogy of the 7,000 whom God “reserved for Himself,” who in the days of Elijah had not bowed the knee to Baal. On this he pauses to remark that the very phrase, “I reserved for myself,” implies that this remnant was saved by faith, and not by works. But how came it that the majority had missed the end for which they sought? Because, he answers, they were hardened; God (as Isaiah prophesied) had sent them a spirit of stupor which finds its illustration in the phrase, “let their eyes be darkened,” amid David’s prayer for the humiliation and bewilderment of his enemies.38
But then another awful question occurs: is this hardening, this spiritual blindness, to be final? “Did they stumble that they may utterly fall?” Again Paul exclaims, Perish the thought! Their very full was meant for salvation to the Gentiles, and to stimulate their own hearts to better things. And here his readers could not but feel that he was explaining facts which were taking place under their very eyes. In every instance the Gospel had been offered first to the Jew; in every instance the Jew had rejected it; and it was through this very obstinacy that it had now been offered everywhere to the Gentile. The Messiah rejected by the Jew was daily being glorified as the Redeemer of the Gentile. The Church of the Christ was now securely founded, but even already Antioch, and Rome, and Ephesus, and Thessalonica were far more its capitals than the Holy City. But this fact revealed a glorious anticipation. If their deficiencywas thus the wealth of the Gentiles, how much more would their replenishment! It was his grand mission to preach this to the Gentiles, and thereby, if possible, to stir the Jews to emulation, for if their rejection be the world’s reconciliation, what will be their acceptance but life from the dead?
And that there will be this restoration of Israel he illustrates by a double metaphor.
i. When the heave–offering was offered, the whole lump of dough acquired sacredness from the fact that a portion of it was sanctified to the Lord. So with Israel. Their first–fruits—Abraham and their patriarchal fathers—were holy, and their holiness was ideally attributable to all the race.
ii. The second metaphor has a wider applicability. The root of the olive–tree is the source of its fruitfulness; but if some of its branches lose their fruitfulness and become withered, they are lopped off and are replaced by grafts of the wild olive, which then shares the richness of the tree. Such withered branches were the present unbelieving majority of Israel. That they should be lopped off is a part of God’s just and necessary severity. To explain this truth— to bring it home to the pained and angry consciousness of his people—has been one of his objects in this great Epistle; and he has carried it out, at whatever cost, with a most unflinching sincerity. But meanwhile, if the Gentiles in their turn were tempted to assume the airs of particularism with which the Jews had so long gloried over them, what a warning should be conveyed to them by the state of things here shadowed forth! And how much consolation might the Jew find in this metaphor to revive the fainting hopes of his patriotism, and to alleviate his wounded pride of nationality by gentler and holier thoughts! For Christ, after all, was a rod of the stem of Jesse, and a branch out of his roots. The Gentiles were admitted into the Church through the vestibule of the Temple. With the Jews had remained till this moment the oracles of God. In Judaism—its privileges, its promises, its prophecies—were the germs of Christianity. The new rich fruitfulness of the Gentiles was drawn from the tree into which they had been grafted. Little cause had they to boast against the natural branches. Deep cause had they to take warning by the fate which those branches had undergone. They, in their turn, might be lopped off, and— though here the metaphor as such breaks down—the old branches might be grafted into their proper place once more.39 Let them remember that faith was the source of their new privileges, as the want of it had caused the ruin of those whom they replaced; let them not be high–minded, but fear.40
The concluding words of this section of the Epistle open a glorious perspective of ultimate hope for all whose hearts are sufficiently large and loving to accept it. He calls on the brethren not to ignore the mystery that the partial hardening of Israel should only last till the fulness of the Gentiles should come in; and he appeals to Scripture (Isa. 59:20) to support his prophecy that “all Israel shall be saved,” beloved as they are for the sake of their fathers as regards the election of grace, though now alienated for the blessing of the Gentiles as regards the Gospel.
For God’s gifts and calling admit of no revocation; once given, they are given for ever. Once themselves disobedient, the Gentiles were now pitied in consequence of the disobedience of the Jews; so the Jews were now disobedient, but when the pity shown to the Gentiles had achieved their full redemption, the Jews in turn should share in it.41 “For”—such is the grand conclusion of this sustained exposition of the Divine purposes—“God shut up all into disobedience,42 that He might show mercy unto all”—Many are anxious, in accordance with their theological views, to weaken or explain away the meaning of these words; to show that “all” does not really mean “all” in the glad, though it does in the gloomy clause; or to show that “having mercy upon all” is quite consistent with the final ruin of the vast majority. Be that as it may, the Apostle, as he contemplates the universality of free redeeming grace, bursts into a pæan of praise and prophecy: “O the depth of the riches, and wisdom, and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are His judgments, and untrackable His ways! For who ever fathomed the mind of the Lord, or who ever became His counsellor? Or who gave Him first, and it shall be repaid to him? For from Him, and through Him, and unto Him are all things. To Him be glory for ever. Amen.”