M. Renan sums up his interesting volume on St. Paul by saying:—'After
having been for three hundred years, thanks to Protestantism, the
Christian doctor par excellence, Paul is now coming to an end of his
reign.' All through his book M. Renan is possessed with a sense of this
close relationship between St. Paul and Protestantism. Protestantism has
made Paul, he says; Pauline doctrine is identified with Protestant
doctrine; Paul is a Protestant doctor, and the counterpart of Luther. M.
Renan has a strong distaste for Protestantism, and this distaste extends
itself to the Protestant Paul. The reign of this Protestant is now
coming to an end, and such a consummation evidently has M. Renan's
approval.
St. Paul is now coming to an end of his reign. Precisely the contrary,
I venture to think, is the judgment to which a true criticism of men and
of things, in our own country at any rate, leads us. The Protestantism
which has so used and abused St. Paul is coming to an end; its
organisations, strong and active as they look, are touched with the
finger of death; its fundamental ideas, sounding forth still every week
from thousands of pulpits, have in them no significance and no power for
the progressive thought of humanity. But the reign of the real St. Paul
is only beginning; his fundamental ideas, disengaged from the elaborate
misconceptions with which Protestantism has overlaid them, will have an
influence in the future greater than any which they have yet had,—an
influence proportioned to their correspondence with a number of the
deepest and most permanent facts of human nature itself.
Elsewhere[16] I have pointed out how, for us in this country,
Puritanism is the strong and special representative of Protestantism.
The Church of England existed before Protestantism, and contains much
besides Protestantism. Remove the schemes of doctrine, Calvinistic or
Arminian, which for Protestantism, merely as such, have made the very
substance of its religion, and all that is most valuable in the Church
of England would still remain. These schemes, or the ideas out of which
they spring, show themselves in the Prayer Book; but they are not what
gives the Prayer Book its importance and value. But Puritanism exists
for the sake of these schemes; its organisations are inventions for
enforcing them more purely and thoroughly. Questions of discipline and
ceremonies have, originally at least, been always admitted to be in
themselves secondary; it is because that conception of the ways of God
to man which Puritanism has formed for itself appeared to Puritanism
superlatively true and precious, that Independents and Baptists and
Methodists in England, and Presbyterians in Scotland, have been impelled
to constitute for inculcating it a church-order where it might be less
swamped by the additions and ceremonies of men, might be more simply and
effectively enounced, and might stand more absolute and central, than in
the church-order of Anglicans or Roman Catholics.
Of that conception the cardinal points are fixed by the terms election
and justification. These terms come from the writings of St. Paul, and
the scheme which Puritanism has constructed with them professes to be
St. Paul's scheme. The same scheme, or something very like it, has been,
and still is, embraced by many adherents of the Churches of England and
Rome; but these Churches rest their claims to men's interest and
attachment not on the possession of such a scheme, but on other grounds
with which we have for the present nothing to do. Puritanism's very
reason for existing depends on the worth of this its vital conception,
derived from St. Paul's writings; and when we are told that St. Paul is
a Protestant doctor whose reign is ending, a Puritan, keen, pugnacious,
and sophisticating simple religion of the heart into complicated
theories of the brain about election and justification, we in England,
at any rate, can best try the assertion by fixing our eyes on our own
Puritans, and comparing their doctrine and their hold on vital truth
with St. Paul's.
This we propose now to do, and, indeed, to do it will only be to
complete what we have already begun. For already, when we were speaking
of Hebraism and Hellenism,[17] we were led to remark how the
over-Hebraising of Puritanism, and its want of a wide culture, do so
narrow its range and impair its vision that even the documents which it
thinks all-sufficient, and to the study of which it exclusively rivets
itself, it does not rightly understand, but is apt to make of them
something quite different from what they really are. In short, no man,
we said, who knows nothing else, knows even his Bible. And we showed how
readers of the Bible attached to essential words and ideas of the Bible
a sense which was not the writer's; and in particular how this had
happened with regard to the Pauline doctrine of resurrection. Let us
take the present opportunity of going further in the same road; and
instead of lightly disparaging the great name of St. Paul, let us see if
the needful thing is not rather to rescue St. Paul and the Bible from
the perversions of them by mistaken men.
So long as the well-known habit, on which we have so often enlarged,
prevails amongst our countrymen, of holding mechanically their ideas
themselves, but making it their chief aim to work with energy and
enthusiasm for the organisations which profess those ideas, English
Puritanism is not likely to make such a return upon its own thoughts,
and upon the elements of its being, as to accomplish for itself an
operation of the kind needed; though it has men whose natural faculties,
were they but free to use them, would undoubtedly prove equal to the
task. The same habit prevents our Puritans from being reached by
philosophical works, which exist in sufficient numbers and of which M.
Reuss's history of the growth of Christian theology[18] is an admirable
specimen,—works where the entire scheme of Pauline doctrine is laid out
with careful research and impartial accuracy. To give effect to the
predominant points in Paul's teaching, and to exhibit these in so plain
and popular a manner as to invite and almost compel men's comprehension,
is not the design of such works; and only by writings with this design
in view will English Puritanism be reached.
Our one qualification for the business in hand lies in that belief of
ours, so much contested by our countrymen, of the primary needfulness of
seeing things as they really are, and of the greater importance of ideas
than of the machinery which exists for them. If by means of letting our
consciousness work quite freely, and by following the methods of
studying and judging thence generated, we are shown that we ought in
real truth neither to abase St. Paul and Puritanism together, as M.
Renan does, nor to abase St. Paul but exalt Puritanism, nor yet to exalt
both Puritanism and St. Paul together, but rather to abase Puritanism
and exalt St. Paul, then we cannot but think that even for Puritanism
itself, also, it will be the best, however unpalatable, to be shown
this. Puritanism certainly wishes well to St. Paul; it cannot wish to
compromise him by an unintelligent adhesion to him and a blind adoption
of his words, instead of being a true child to him. Yet this is what it
has really done. What in St. Paul is secondary and subordinate,
Puritanism has made primary and essential; what in St Paul is figure and
belongs to the sphere of feeling, Puritanism has transported into the
sphere of intellect and made formula. On the other hand, what is with
St. Paul primary, Puritanism has treated as subordinate: and what is
with him thesis, and belonging (so far as anything in religion can
properly be said thus to belong) to the sphere of intellect, Puritanism
has made image and figure.
And first let us premise what we mean in this matter by primary and
secondary, essential and subordinate. We mean, so far as the apostle is
concerned, a greater or less approach to what really characterises him
and gives his teaching its originality and power. We mean, so far as
truth is concerned, a greater or less agreement with facts which can be
verified, and a greater or less power of explaining them. What
essentially characterises a religious teacher, and gives him his
permanent worth and vitality, is, after all, just the scientific value
of his teaching, its correspondence with important facts, and the light
it throws on them. Never was the truth of this so evident as now. The
scientific sense in man never asserted its claim so strongly; the
propensity of religion to neglect those claims, and the peril and loss
to it from neglecting them, never were so manifest. The license of
affirmation about God and his proceedings, in which the religious world
indulge, is more and more met by the demand for verification. When
Calvinism tells us: 'It is agreed between God and the Mediator Jesus
Christ, the Son of God, surety for the redeemed, as parties-contractors,
that the sins of the redeemed should be imputed to innocent Christ, and
he both condemned and put to death for them, upon this very condition,
that whosoever heartily consents unto the covenant of reconciliation
offered through Christ, shall, by the imputation of his obedience unto
them, be justified and holden righteous before God;'—when Calvinism
tells us this, is it not talking about God just as if he were a man in
the next street, whose proceedings Calvinism intimately knew and could
give account of, could verify that account at any moment, and enable us
to verify it also? It is true, when the scientific sense in us, the
sense which seeks exact knowledge, calls for that verification,
Calvinism refers us to St. Paul, from whom it professes to have got this
history of what it calls 'the covenant of redemption.' But this is only
pushing the difficulty a stage further back. For if it is St. Paul, and
not Calvinism, that professes this exact acquaintance with God and his
doings, the scientific sense calls upon St. Paul to produce the facts by
which he verifies what he says; and if he cannot produce them, then it
treats both St. Paul's assertion, and Calvinism's assertion after him,
as of no real consequence.
No one will deny that such is the behaviour of science towards religion
in our day, though many may deplore it. And it is not that the
scientific sense in us denies the rights of the poetic sense, which
employs a figured and imaginative language. But the language we have
just been quoting is not figurative and poetic language, it is
scholastic and scientific language. Assertions in scientific language
must stand the tests of scientific examination. Neither is it that the
scientific sense in us refuses to admit willingly and reverently the
name of God, as a point in which the religious and the scientific sense
may meet, as the least inadequate name for that universal order which
the intellect feels after as a law, and the heart feels after as a
benefit. 'We, too,' might the men of science with truth say to the men
of religion—'we, too, would gladly say God, if only, the moment one
says God, you would not pester one with your pretensions of knowing
all about him.' That stream of tendency by which all things strive to
fulfil the law of their being, and which, inasmuch as our idea of real
welfare resolves itself into this fulfilment of the law of one's being,
man rightly deems the fountain of all goodness, and calls by the
worthiest and most solemn name he can, which is God, science also might
willingly own for the fountain of all goodness, and call God. But
however much more than this the heart may with propriety put into its
language respecting God, this is as much as science can with strictness
put there. Therefore, when the religious world, following its bent of
trying to describe what it loves, amplifying and again amplifying its
description, and guarding finally this amplified description by the most
precise and rigid terms it can find, comes at last, with the best
intentions, to the notion of a sort of magnified and non-natural man,
who proceeds in the fashion laid down in the Calvinistic thesis we have
quoted, then science strikes in, remarks the difference between this
second notion and the notion it originally admitted, and demands to have
the new notion verified, as the first can be verified, by facts. But
this does not unsettle the first notion, or prevent science from
acknowledging the importance and the scientific validity of propositions
which are grounded upon the first notion, and shed light over it.
Nevertheless, researches in this sphere are now a good deal eclipsed in
popularity by researches in the sphere of physics, and no longer have
the vogue which they once had. I have related how an eminent physicist
with whose acquaintance I am honoured, imagines me to have invented the
author of the Sacra Privata; and that fashionable newspaper, the
Morning Post, undertaking,—as I seemed, it said, very anxious about
the matter,—to supply information as to who the author really was, laid
it down that he was Bishop of Calcutta, and that his ideas and writings,
to which I attached so much value, had been among the main provocatives
of the Indian mutiny. Therefore it is perhaps expedient to refresh our
memory as to these schemes of doctrine, Calvinistic or Arminian, for the
upholding of which, as has been said, British Puritanism exists, before
we proceed to compare them, for correspondence with facts and for
scientific validity, with the teaching of St. Paul.
Calvinism, then, begins by laying down that God from all eternity
decreed whatever was to come to pass in time; that by his decree a
certain number of angels and men are predestinated, out of God's mere
free grace and love, without any foresight of faith or good works in
them, to everlasting life; and others foreordained, according to the
unsearchable counsel of his will, whereby he extends or withholds mercy
as he pleases, to everlasting death. God made, however, our first
parents, Adam and Eve, upright and able to keep his law, which was
written in their hearts; at the same time entering into a contract with
them, and with their posterity as represented in them, by which they
were assured of everlasting life in return for perfect obedience, and of
everlasting death if they should be disobedient. Our first parents,
being enticed by Satan, a fallen angel speaking in the form of a
serpent, broke this covenant of works, as it is called, by eating the
forbidden fruit; and hereby they, and their posterity in them and with
them, became not only liable to eternal death, but lost also their
natural uprightness and all ability to please God; nay, they became by
nature enemies to God and to all spiritual good, and inclined only to
evil continually. This, says Calvinism, is our original sin; the bitter
root of all our actual transgressions, in thought, word, and deed.
Yet, though man has neither power nor inclination to rise out of this
wretched fallen state, but is rather disposed to lie insensible in it
till he perish, another covenant exists by which his condition is
greatly affected. This is the covenant of redemption, made and agreed
upon, says Calvinism, between God the Father and God the Son in the
Council of the Trinity before the world began. The sum of the covenant
of redemption is this: God having, by the eternal decree already
mentioned, freely chosen to life a certain number of lost mankind, gave
them before the world began to God the Son, appointed Redeemer, on
condition that if he humbled himself so far as to assume the human
nature in union with the divine nature, submit himself to the law as
surety for the elect, and satisfy justice for them by giving obedience
in their name, even to suffering the cursed death of the cross, he
should ransom and redeem them from sin and death, and purchase for them
righteousness and eternal life. The Son of God accepted the condition,
or bargain as Calvinism calls it; and in the fulness of time came, as
Jesus Christ, into the world, was born of the Virgin Mary, subjected
himself to the law, and completely paid the due ransom on the cross.
God has in his word, the Bible, revealed to man this covenant of grace
or redemption. All those whom he has predestinated to life he in his own
time effectually calls to be partakers in the release offered. Man is
altogether passive in this call, until the Holy Spirit enables him to
answer it. The Holy Spirit, the third person in the Trinity, applies to
the elect the redemption purchased by Christ, through working faith in
them. As soon as the elect have faith in Jesus Christ, that is, as soon
as they give their consent heartily and repentantly, in the sense of
deserved condemnation, to the covenant of grace, God justifies them by
imputing to them that perfect obedience which Christ gave to the law,
and the satisfaction also which upon the cross Christ gave to justice in
their name. They who are thus called and justified are by the same power
likewise sanctified; the dominion of carnal lusts being destroyed in
them, and the practice of holiness being, in spite of some remnants of
corruption, put in their power. Good works, done in obedience to God's
moral law, are the fruits and evidences of a true faith; and the persons
of the faithful elect being accepted through Christ, their good works
also are accepted in him and rewarded. But works done by other and
unregenerate men, though they may be things which God commands, cannot
please God and are sinful. The elect can after justification and
sanctification no more fall from the state of grace, but shall certainly
persevere to the end and be eternally saved; and of this they may, even
in the present life, have the certain assurance. Finally, after death,
their souls and bodies are joyfully joined together again in the
resurrection, and they remain thenceforth for ever with Christ in glory;
while all the wicked are sent away into hell with Satan, whom they have
served.
We have here set down the main doctrines of Calvinistic Puritanism
almost entirely in words of its own choosing. It is not necessary to
enter into distinctions such as those between sublapsarians and
supralapsarians, between Calvinists who believe that God's decree of
election and reprobation was passed in foresight of original sin and on
account of it, and Calvinists who believe that it was passed absolutely
and independently. The important points of Calvinism,—original sin,
free election, effectual calling, justification through imputed
righteousness,—are common to both. The passiveness of man, the activity
of God, are the great features in this scheme; there is very little of
what man thinks and does, very much of what God thinks and does; and
what God thinks and does is described with such particularity that the
figure we have used of the man in the next street cannot but recur
strongly to our minds.
The positive Protestantism of Puritanism, with which we are here
concerned, as distinguished from the negative Protestantism of the
Church of England, has nourished itself with ardour on this scheme of
doctrine. It informs and fashions the whole religion of Scotland,
established and nonconforming. It is the doctrine which Puritan flocks
delight to hear from their ministers. It was Puritanism's constant
reproach against the Church of England, that this essential doctrine was
not firmly enough held and set forth by her. At the Hampton Court
Conference in 1604, in the Committee of Divines appointed by the House
of Lords in 1641, and again at the Savoy Conference in 1661, the
reproach regularly appeared. 'Some have defended,' is the Puritan
complaint, 'the whole gross substance of Arminianism, that the act of
conversion depends upon the concurrence of man's free will; some do
teach and preach that good works are concauses with faith in the act of
justification; some have defended universal grace, some have absolutely
denied original sin.' As Puritanism grew, the Calvinistic scheme of
doctrine hardened and became stricter. Of the Calvinistic confessions of
faith of the sixteenth century,—the Helvetic Confession, the Belgic
Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism,—the Calvinism is so moderate as
to astonish any one who has been used only to its later developments.
Even the much abused canons of the Synod of Dort no one can read
attentively through without finding in parts of them a genuine movement
of thought,—sometimes even a philosophic depth,—and a powerful
religious feeling. In the documents of the Westminster Assembly,
twenty-five years later, this has disappeared; and what we call the
British Philistine stands in his religious capacity, sheer and stark,
before us. Seriousness is the one merit of these documents, but it is a
seriousness too mixed with the alloy of mundane strife and hatred to be
called a religious feeling. Not a trace of delicacy of perception, or of
philosophic thinking; the mere rigidness and contentiousness of the
controversialist and political dissenter; a Calvinism exaggerated till
it is simply repelling; and to complete the whole, a machinery of
covenants, conditions, bargains, and parties-contractors, such as could
have proceeded from no one but the born Anglo-Saxon man of business,
British or American.
However, a scheme of doctrine is not necessarily false because of the
style in which its adherents may have at a particular moment enounced
it. From the faults which disfigure the performance of the Westminster
divines the profession of faith prefixed to the Congregational
Year-Book is free. The Congregationalists form one of the two great
divisions of English Puritans. 'Congregational churches believe,' their
Year-Book tells us, 'that the first man disobeyed the divine command,
fell from his state of innocence and purity, and involved all his
posterity in the consequences of that fall. They believe that all who
will be saved were the objects of God's eternal and electing love, and
were given by an act of divine sovereignty to the Son of God. They
believe that Christ meritoriously obtained eternal redemption for us,
and that the Holy Spirit is given in consequence of Christ's mediation.'
The essential points of Calvinism are all here. To this profession of
faith, annually published in the Year-Book of the Independents,
subscription is not required; Puritanism thus remaining honourably
consistent with the protests which, at the Restoration, it made against
the call for subscription. But the authors of the Year-Book say with
pride, and it is a common boast of the Independent churches, that though
they do not require subscription, there is, perhaps, in no religious
body, such firm and general agreement in doctrine as among
Congregationalists. This is true, and it is even more true of the flocks
than of the ministers, of whom the abler and the younger begin to be
lifted by the stream of modern ideas. Still, up to the present time, the
Protestantism of one great division of English Puritans is undoubtedly
Calvinist; the Baptists holding in general the scheme of Calvinism yet
more strictly than the Independents.
The other great division of English Puritanism is formed by the
Methodists. Wesleyan Methodism is, as is well known, not Calvinist, but
Arminian. The Methodist Magazine was called by Wesley the Arminian
Magazine, and kept that title all through his life. Arminianism is an
attempt made with the best intentions, and with much truth of practical
sense, but not in a very profound philosophical spirit, to escape from
what perplexes and shocks us in Calvinism. The God of Calvinism is a
magnified and non-natural man who decrees at his mere good pleasure some
men to salvation and other men to reprobation; the God of Arminianism is
a magnified and non-natural man who foreknows the course of each man's
life, and who decrees each of us to salvation or reprobation in
accordance with this foreknowledge. But so long as we remain in this
anthropomorphic order of ideas the question will always occur: Why did
not a being of infinite power and infinite love so make all men as that
there should be no cause for this sad foreknowledge and sad decree
respecting a number of them? In truth, Calvinism is both theologically
more coherent, and also shows a deeper sense of reality than
Arminianism, which, in the practical man's fashion, is apt to scrape the
surface of things only.
For instance, the Arminian Remonstrants, in their zeal to justify the
morality, in a human sense, of God's ways, maintained that he sent his
word to one nation rather than another according as he saw that one
nation was more worthy than another of such a preference. The Calvinist
doctors of the Synod of Dort have no difficulty in showing that Moses
and Christ both of them assert, with respect to the Jewish nation, the
direct contrary; and not only do they here obtain a theological triumph,
but in rebutting the Arminian theory they are in accordance with
historical truth and with the real march of human affairs. They allow
more for the great fact of the not ourselves in what we do and are.
The Calvinists seize, we say, that great fact better than the Arminians.
The Calvinist's fault is in his scientific appreciation of the fact; in
the reasons he gives for it. God, he says, sends his word to one nation
rather than another at his mere good pleasure. Here we have again the
magnified and non-natural man, who likes and dislikes, knows and
decrees, just as a man, only on a scale immensely transcending anything
of which we have experience, and whose proceedings we nevertheless
describe as if he were in the next street for people to verify all we
say about him.
Arminian Methodism, however, puts aside the Calvinistic doctrine of
predestination. The foremost place, which in the Calvinist scheme
belongs to the doctrine of predestination, belongs in the Methodist
scheme to the doctrine of justification by faith. More and more
prominently does modern Methodism elevate this as its essential
doctrine; and the era in their founder's life which Methodists select to
celebrate is the era of his conversion to it. It is the doctrine of
Anselm, adopted and developed by Luther, set forth in the Confession of
Augsburg, and current all through the popular theology of our day. We
shall find it in almost any popular hymn we happen to take, but the
following lines of Milton exhibit it classically. By the fall of our
first parents, says he:—
Man, losing all,
To expiate his treason hath nought left,
But to destruction sacred and devote
He with his whole posterity must die;
Die he or justice must; unless for him
Some other able, and as willing, pay
The rigid satisfaction; death for death.
|
By Adam's fall, God's justice and mercy were placed in conflict. God
could not follow his mercy without violating his justice. Christ by his
satisfaction gave the Father the right and power (nudum jus Patri
acquirebat, said the Arminians) to follow his mercy, and to make with
man the covenant of free justification by faith, whereby, if a man has a
sure trust and confidence that his sins are forgiven him in virtue of
the satisfaction made to God for them by the death of Christ, he is held
clear of sin by God, and admitted to salvation.
This doctrine, like the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, involves a
whole history of God's proceedings, and gives, also, first and almost
sole place to what God does, with disregard to what man does. It has
thus an essential affinity with Calvinism; indeed, Calvinism is but this
doctrine of original sin and justification, plus the doctrine of
predestination. Nay, the Welsh Methodists, as is well known, have no
difficulty in combining the tenet of election with the practices and
most of the tenets of Methodism. The word solifidian points precisely
to that which is common to both Calvinism and Methodism, and which has
made both these halves of English Puritanism so popular,—their
sensational side, as it may be called, their laying all stress on a
wonderful and particular account of what God gives and works for us, not
on what we bring or do for ourselves. 'Plead thou singly,' says Wesley,
'the blood of the covenant, the ransom paid for thy proud stubborn
soul.' Wesley's doctrines of conversion, of the new birth, of
sanctification, of the direct witness of the spirit, of assurance, of
sinless perfection, all of them thus correspond with doctrines which we
have noticed in Calvinism, and show a common character with them. The
instantaneousness Wesley loved to ascribe to conversion and
sanctification points the same way. 'God gives in a moment such a faith
in the blood of his Son as translates us out of darkness into light, out
of sin and fear into holiness and happiness.' And again, 'Look for
sanctification just as you are, as a poor sinner that has nothing to
pay, nothing to plead but Christ died.' This is the side in Wesley's
teaching which his followers have above all seized, and which they are
eager to hold forth as the essential part of his legacy towards them.
It is true that from the same reason which prevents, as we have said,
those who know their Bible and nothing else from really knowing even
their Bible, Methodists, who for the most part know nothing but Wesley,
do not really know even Wesley. It is true that what really
characterises this most interesting and most attractive man, is not his
doctrine of justification by faith, or any other of his set doctrines,
but is entirely what we may call his genius for godliness. Mr.
Alexander Knox, in his remarks on his friend's life and character,
insists much on an entry in Wesley's Journal in 1767, where he seems
impatient at the endless harping on the tenet of justification, and
where he asks 'if it is not high time to return to the plain word: "He
that feareth God and worketh righteousness is accepted with him."' Mr.
Knox is right in thinking that the feeling which made Wesley ask this is
what gave him his vital worth and character as a man; but it is not what
gives him his character as the teacher of Methodism. Methodism rejects
Mr. Knox's version of its founder, and insists on making the article of
justification the very corner-stone of the Wesleyan edifice.
And the truth undoubtedly is, that not by his assertion of what man
brings, but by his assertion of what God gives, by his doctrines of
conversion, instantaneous justification and sanctification, assurance,
and sinless perfection, does Wesley live and operate in Methodism. 'You
think, I must first be or do thus or thus (for sanctification). Then you
are seeking it by works unto this day. If you seek it by faith, you may
expect it as you are; then expect it now. It is of importance to observe
that there is an inseparable connection between these three points:
expect it by faith, expect it as you are, and expect it now. To
deny one of them is to deny them all; to allow one is to allow them
all.' This is the teaching of Wesley, which has made the great Methodist
half of English Puritanism what it is, and not his hesitations and
recoils at the dangers of his own teaching.
No doubt, as the seriousness of Calvinism, its perpetual conversance
with deep matters and with the Bible, have given force and fervency to
Calvinist Puritans, so the loveliness of Wesley's piety, and what we
have called his genius for godliness, have sweetened and made amiable
numberless lives of Methodist Puritans. But as a religious teacher,
Wesley is to be judged by his doctrine; and his doctrine, like the
Calvinistic scheme, rests with all its weight on the assertion of
certain minutely described proceedings on God's part, independent of us,
our experience, and our will; and leads its recipients to look, in
religion, not so much for an arduous progress on their own part, and the
exercise of their activity, as for strokes of magic, and what may be
called a sensational character.
In the Heidelberg Catechism, after an answer in which the catechist
rehearses the popularly received doctrine of original sin and vicarious
satisfaction for it, the catechiser asks the pertinent question: 'Unde
id scis?'—how do you know all that? The Apostle Paul is, as we have
already shown, the great authority for it whom formal theology invokes;
his name is used by popular theology with the same confidence. I open a
modern book of popular religion at the account of a visit paid to a
hardened criminal seized with terror the night before his execution. The
visitor says: 'I now stand in Paul's place, and say: In Christ's stead
we pray you, be ye reconciled to God. I beg you to accept the pardon of
all your sins, which Christ has purchased for you, and which God freely
bestows on you for his sake. If you do not understand, I say: God's ways
are not as our ways.' And the narrative of the criminal's conversion
goes on: 'That night was spent in singing the praises of the Saviour who
had purchased his pardon.'
Both Calvinism and Methodism appeal, therefore, to the Bible, and, above
all, to St. Paul, for the history they propound of the relations between
God and man; but Calvinism relies most, in enforcing it, on man's fears,
Methodism on man's hopes. Calvinism insists on man's being under a
curse; it then works the sense of sin, misery, and terror in him, and
appeals pre-eminently to the desire to flee from the wrath to come.
Methodism, too, insists on his being under a curse; but it works most
the sense of hope in him, the craving for happiness, and appeals
pre-eminently to the desire for eternal bliss. No one, however, will
maintain that the particular account of God's proceedings with man,
whereby Methodism and Calvinism operate on these desires, proves itself
by internal evidence, and establishes without external aid its own
scientific validity. So we may either directly try, as best we can, its
scientific validity in itself; or, as it professes to have Paul's
authority to support it, we may first inquire what is really Paul's
account of God's proceedings with man, and whether this tallies with the
Puritan account and confirms it. The latter is in every way the safer
and the more instructive course to follow. And we will follow
Puritanism's example in taking St. Paul's mature and greatest work, the
Epistle to the Romans, as the chief place for finding what he really
thought on the points in question.
We have already said elsewhere,[19] indeed, what is very true, and what
must never be forgotten, that what St. Paul, a man so separated from us
by time, race, training and circumstances, really thought, we cannot
make sure of knowing exactly. All we can do is to get near it, reading
him with the sort of critical tact which the study of the human mind and
its history, and the acquaintance with many great writers, naturally
gives for following the movement of any one single great writer's
thought; reading him, also, without preconceived theories to which we
want to make his thoughts fit themselves. It is evident that the English
translation of the Epistle to the Romans has been made by men with their
heads full of the current doctrines of election and justification we
have been noticing; and it has thereby received such a bias,—of which a
strong example is the use of the word atonement in the eleventh verse
of the fifth chapter,—that perhaps it is almost impossible for any one
who reads the English translation only, to take into his mind Paul's
thought without a colouring from the current doctrines. But besides
discarding the English translation, we must bear in mind, if we wish to
get as near Paul's real thought as possible, two things which have
greatly increased the facilities for misrepresenting him.
In the first place, Paul, like the other Bible-writers, and like the
Semitic race in general, has a much juster sense of the true scope and
limits of diction in religious deliverances than we have. He uses within
the sphere of religious emotion expressions which, in this sphere, have
an eloquence and a propriety, but which are not to be taken out of it
and made into formal scientific propositions.
This is a point very necessary to be borne in mind in reading the Bible.
The prophet Nahum says in the book of his vision: 'God is jealous, and
the Lord revengeth;'[20] and the authors of the Westminster
Confession, drawing out a scientific theology, lay down the proposition
that God is a jealous and vengeful God, and think they prove their
proposition by quoting in a note the words of Nahum. But this is as if
we took from a chorus of Æschylus one of his grand passages about guilt
and destiny, just put the words straight into the formal and exact cast
of a sentence of Aristotle, and said that here was the scientific
teaching of Greek philosophy on these matters. The Hebrew genius has
not, like the Greek, its conscious and clear-marked division into a
poetic side and a scientific side; the scientific side is almost absent.
The Bible utterances have often the character of a chorus of Æschylus,
but never that of a treatise of Aristotle. We, like the Greeks, possess
in our speech and thought the two characters; but so far as the Bible is
concerned we have generally confounded them, and have used our double
possession for our bewilderment rather than turned it to good account.
The admirable maxim of the great mediæval Jewish school of Biblical
critics: The Law speaks with the tongue of the children of men,—a
maxim which is the very foundation of all sane Biblical criticism,—was
for centuries a dead letter to the whole body of our Western exegesis,
and is a dead letter to the whole body of our popular exegesis still.
Taking the Bible language as equivalent with the language of the
scientific intellect, a language which is adequate and absolute, we have
never been in a position to use the key which this maxim of the Jewish
doctors offers to us. But it is certain that, whatever strain the
religious expressions of the Semitic genius were meant, in the minds of
those who gave utterance to them, to bear, the particular strain which
we Western people put upon them is one which they were not meant to
bear.
We have used the word Hebraise[21] for another purpose, to denote the
exclusive attention to the moral side of our nature, to conscience, and
to doing rather than knowing; so, to describe the vivid and figured way
in which St. Paul, within the sphere of religious emotion, uses words,
without carrying them outside it, we will use the word Orientalise.
When Paul says: 'God hath concluded them all in unbelief that he might
have mercy upon all,'[22] he Orientalises; that is, he does not mean to
assert formally that God acted with this set design, but, being full of
the happy and divine end to the unbelief spoken of, he, by a vivid and
striking figure, represents the unbelief as actually caused with a view
to this end. But when the Calvinists of the Synod of Dort, wishing to
establish the formal proposition that faith and all saving gifts flow
from election and nothing else, quote an expression of Paul's similar to
the one we have quoted, 'He hath chosen us,' they say, 'not because we
were, but that we might be holy and without blame before him,' they go
quite wide of the mark, from not perceiving that what the apostle used
as a vivid figure of rhetoric, they are using as a formal scientific
proposition.
When Paul Orientalises, the fault is not with him when he is
misunderstood, but with the prosaic and unintelligent Western readers
who have not enough tact for style to comprehend his mode of expression.
But he also Judaises; and here his liability to being misunderstood by
us Western people is undoubtedly due to a defect in the critical habit
of himself and his race. A Jew himself, he uses the Jewish Scriptures in
a Jew's arbitrary and uncritical fashion, as if they had a talismanic
character; as if for a doctrine, however true in itself, their
confirmation was still necessary, and as if this confirmation was to be
got from their mere words alone, however detached from the sense of
their context, and however violently allegorised or otherwise wrested.
To use the Bible in this way, even for purposes of illustration, is
often an interruption to the argument, a fault of style; to use it in
this way for real proof and confirmation, is a fault of reasoning. An
example of the first fault may be seen in the tenth chapter of the
Epistle to the Romans, and in the beginning of the third chapter. The
apostle's point in either place,—his point that faith comes by hearing,
and his point that God's oracles were true though the Jews did not
believe them,—would stand much clearer without their scaffolding of
Bible-quotation. An instance of the second fault is in the third and
fourth chapters of the Epistle to the Galatians, where the Biblical
argumentation by which the apostle seeks to prove his case is as unsound
as his case itself is sound. How far these faults are due to the apostle
himself, how far to the requirements of those for whom he wrote, we need
not now investigate. It is enough that he undoubtedly uses the letter of
Scripture in this arbitrary and Jewish way; and thus Puritanism, which
has only itself to blame for misunderstanding him when he Orientalises,
may fairly put upon the apostle himself some of its blame for
misunderstanding him when he Judaises, and for Judaising so strenuously
along with him.
To get, therefore, at what Paul really thought and meant to say, it is
necessary for us modern and western people to translate him. And not as
Puritanism, which has merely taken his letter and recast it in the
formal propositions of a modern scientific treatise; but his letter
itself must be recast before it can be properly conveyed by such
propositions. And as the order in which, in any series of ideas, the
ideas come, is of great importance to the final result, and as Paul, who
did not write scientific treatises, but had always religious edification
in direct view, never set out his doctrine with a design of exhibiting
it as a scientific whole, we must also find out for ourselves the order
in which Paul's ideas naturally stand, and the connexion between one of
them and the other, in order to arrive at the real scheme of his
teaching, as compared with the schemes exhibited by Puritanism.
We remarked how what sets the Calvinist in motion seems to be the desire
to flee from the wrath to come; and what sets the Methodist in motion,
the desire for eternal bliss. What is it which sets Paul in motion? It
is the impulse which we have elsewhere noted as the master-impulse of
Hebraism,—the desire for righteousness. 'I exercise myself,' he told
Felix, 'to have a conscience void of offence towards God and men
continually.'[23] To the Hebrew, this moral order, or righteousness,
was pre-eminently the universal order, the law of God; and God, the
fountain of all goodness, was pre-eminently to him the giver of the
moral law. The end and aim of all religion, access to God,—the sense
of harmony with the universal order—the partaking of the divine
nature—that our faith and hope might be in God—that we might have life
and have it more abundantly,—meant for the Hebrew, access to the source
of the moral order in especial, and harmony with it. It was the
greatness of the Hebrew race that it felt the authority of this order,
its preciousness and its beneficence, so strongly. 'How precious are thy
thoughts unto me, O God!'—'The law of thy mouth is better than
thousands of gold and silver.'—'My soul is consumed with the very
fervent desire that it hath alway unto thy judgments.'[24] It was the
greatness of their best individuals that in them this feeling was
incessantly urgent to prove itself in the only sure manner,—in action.
'Blessed are they who hear the word of God, and keep it.' 'If thou
wouldst enter into life, keep the commandments.' 'Let no man deceive
you, he that doeth righteousness is righteous.'[25] What
distinguishes Paul is both his conviction that the commandment is holy,
and just, and good; and also his desire to give effect to the
commandment, to establish it. It was this which gave to his endeavour
after a clear conscience such meaning and efficacity. It was this which
gave him insight to see that there could be no radical difference, in
respect of salvation and the way to it, between Jew and Gentile. 'Upon
every soul of man that worketh evil, whoever he may be, tribulation
and anguish; to every one that worketh good, glory, honour, and
peace!'[26]
St. Paul's piercing practical religious sense, joined to his strong
intellectual power, enabled him to discern and follow the range of the
commandment, both as to man's actions and as to his heart and thoughts,
with extraordinary force and closeness. His religion had, as we shall
see, a preponderantly mystic side, and nothing is so natural to the
mystic as in rich single words, such as faith, light, love, to sum up
and take for granted, without specially enumerating them all good moral
principles and habits; yet nothing is more remarkable in Paul than the
frequent, nay, incessant lists, in the most particular detail, of moral
habits to be pursued or avoided. Lists of this sort might in a less
sincere and profound writer be formal and wearisome; but to no attentive
reader of St. Paul will they be wearisome, for in making them he touched
the solid ground which was the basis of his religion,—the solid ground
of his hearty desire for righteousness and of his thorough conception of
it,—and only on such a ground was so strong a superstructure possible.
The more one studies these lists, the more does their significance come
out. To illustrate this, let any one go through for himself the
enumeration, too long to be quoted here, in the four last verses of the
first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, of 'things which are not
convenient;' or let him merely consider with attention this catalogue,
towards the end of the fifth chapter of the Epistle to the Galatians, of
fruits of the spirit: 'love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness,
goodness, faith, mildness, self-control.'[27] The man who wrote with
this searching minuteness knew accurately what he meant by sin and
righteousness, and did not use these words at random. His diligent
comprehensiveness in his plan of duties is only less admirable than his
diligent sincerity. The sterner virtues and the gentler, his conscience
will not let him rest till he has embraced them all. In his deep resolve
'to make out by actual trial what is that good and perfect and
acceptable will of God,'[28] he goes back upon himself again and again,
he marks a duty at every point of our nature, and at points the most
opposite, for fear he should by possibility be leaving behind him some
weakness still indulged, some subtle promptings to evil not yet brought
into captivity.
It has not been enough remarked how this incomparable honesty and depth
in Paul's love of righteousness is probably what chiefly explains his
conversion. Most men have the defects, as the saying is, of their
qualities. Because they are ardent and severe they have no sense for
gentleness and sweetness; because they are sweet and gentle they have no
sense for severity and ardour. A Puritan is a Puritan, and a man of
feeling is a man of feeling. But with Paul the very same fulness of
moral nature which made him an ardent Pharisee, 'as concerning zeal,
persecuting the church, touching the righteousness which is in the law,
blameless,' was so large that it carried him out of Pharisaism and
beyond it, when once he found how much needed doing in him which
Pharisaism could not do.
Every attentive regarder of the character of Paul, not only as he was
before his conversion but as he appears to us till his end, must have
been struck with two things: one, the earnest insistence with which he
recommends 'bowels of mercies,' as he calls them: meekness, humbleness
of mind, gentleness, unwearying forbearance, crowned all of them with
that emotion of charity 'which is the bond of perfectness;' the other,
the force with which he dwells on the solidarity (to use the modern
phrase) of man,—the joint interest, that is, which binds humanity
together,—the duty of respecting every one's part in life, and of doing
justice to his efforts to fulfil that part. Never surely did such a
controversialist, such a master of sarcasm and invective, commend, with
such manifest sincerity and such persuasive emotion, the qualities of
meekness and gentleness! Never surely did a worker, who took with such
energy his own line, and who was so born to preponderate and predominate
in whatever line he took, insist so often and so admirably that the
lines of other workers were just as good as his own! At no time,
perhaps, did Paul arrive at practising quite perfectly what he thus
preached; but this only sets in a stronger light the thorough love of
righteousness which made him seek out, and put so prominently forward,
and so strive to make himself and others fulfil, parts of righteousness
which do not force themselves on the common conscience like the duties
of soberness, temperance, and activity, and which were somewhat alien,
certainly, to his own particular nature. Therefore we cannot but believe
that into this spirit, so possessed with the hunger and thirst for
righteousness, and precisely because it was so possessed by it, the
characteristic doctrines of Jesus, which brought a new aliment to feed
this hunger and thirst,—of Jesus whom, except in vision, he had never
seen, but who was in every one's words and thoughts, the teacher who was
meek and lowly in heart, who said men were brothers and must love one
another, that the last should often be first, that the exercise of
dominion and lordship had nothing in them desirable, and that we must
become as little children,—sank down and worked there even before Paul
ceased to persecute, and had no small part in getting him ready for the
crisis of his conversion.
Such doctrines offered new fields of righteousness to the eyes of this
indefatigable explorer of it, and enlarged the domain of duty of which
Pharisaism showed him only a portion. Then, after the satisfaction thus
given to his desire for a full conception of righteousness, came
Christ's injunctions to make clean the inside as well as the outside, to
beware of the least leaven of hypocrisy and self-flattery, of saying and
not doing;—and, finally, the injunction to feel, after doing all we
can, that, as compared with the standard of perfection, we are still
unprofitable servants. These teachings were, to a man like Paul, for the
practice of righteousness what the others were for the
theory;—sympathetic utterances, which made the inmost chords of his
being vibrate, and which irresistibly drew him sooner or later towards
their utterer. Need it be said that he never forgot them, and that in
all his pages they have left their trace? It is even affecting to see,
how, when he is driven for the very sake of righteousness to put the law
of righteousness in the second place, and to seek outside the law itself
for a power to fulfil the law, how, I say, he returns again and again to
the elucidation of his one sole design in all he is doing; how he
labours to prevent all possibility of misunderstanding, and to show that
he is only leaving the moral law for a moment in order to establish it
for ever more victoriously. What earnestness and pathos in the
assurance: 'If there had been a law given which could have given life,
verily, righteousness should have been by the law!'[29] 'Do I condemn
the law?' he keeps saying; 'do I forget that the commandment is holy,
just, and good? Because we are no longer under the law, are we to sin?
Am I seeking to make the course of my life and yours other than a
service and an obedience?' This man, out of whom an astounding criticism
has deduced Antinomianism, is in truth so possessed with horror of
Antinomianism, that he goes to grace for the sole purpose of extirpating
it, and even then cannot rest without perpetually telling us why he is
gone there. This man, whom Calvin and Luther and their followers have
shut up into the two scholastic doctrines of election and justification,
would have said, could we hear him, just what he said about circumcision
and uncircumcision in his own day: 'Election is nothing, and
justification is nothing, but the keeping of the commandments of God.'
This foremost place which righteousness takes in the order of St. Paul's
ideas makes a signal difference between him and Puritanism. Puritanism,
as we have said, finds its starting-point either in the desire to flee
from eternal wrath or in the desire to obtain eternal bliss. Puritanism
has learned from revelation, as it says, a particular history of the
first man's fall, of mankind being under a curse, of certain contracts
having been passed concerning mankind in the Council of the Trinity, of
the substance of those contracts, and of man's position under them. The
great concern of Puritanism is with the operation of those contracts on
man's condition; its leading thought, if it is a Puritanism of a gloomy
turn, is of awe and fear caused by the threatening aspect of man's
condition under these contracts; if of a cheerful turn, of gratitude and
hope caused by the favourable aspect of it. But in either case, foregone
events, the covenant passed, what God has done and does, is the great
matter. What there is left for man to do, the human work of
righteousness, is secondary, and comes in but to attest and confirm our
assurance of what God has done for us. We have seen this in Wesley's
words already quoted: the first thing for a man is to be justified and
sanctified, and to have the assurance that, without seeking it by works,
he is justified and sanctified; then the desire and works of
righteousness follow as a proper result of this condition. Still more
does Calvinism make man's desire and works of righteousness mere
evidences and benefits of more important things; the desire to work
righteousness is among the saving graces applied by the Holy Spirit to
the elect, and the last of those graces. Denique, says the Synod of
Dort, last of all, after faith in the promises and after the witness
of the Spirit, comes, to establish our assurance, a clear conscience and
righteousness. It is manifest how unlike is this order of ideas to
Paul's order, who starts with the thought of a conscience void of
offence towards God and man, and builds upon that thought his whole
system.
But this difference constitutes from the very outset an immense
scientific superiority for the scheme of Paul. Hope and fear are
elements of human nature like the love of right, but they are far
blinder and less scientific elements of it. 'The Bible is a divine
revelation; the Bible declares certain things; the things it thus
declares have the witness of our hopes and fears;'—this is the line of
thought followed by Puritanism. But what science seeks after is a
satisfying rational conception of things. A scheme which fails to give
this, which gives the contrary of this, may indeed be of a nature to
move our hopes and fears, but is to science of none the more value on
that account.
Nor does our calling such a scheme a revelation mend the matter.
Instead of covering the scientific inadequacy of a conception by the
authority of a revelation, science rather proves the authority of a
revelation by the scientific adequacy of the conceptions given in it,
and limits the sphere of that authority to the sphere of that adequacy.
The more an alleged revelation seems to contain precious and striking
things, the more will science be inclined to doubt the correctness of
any deduction which draws from it, within the sphere of these things, a
scheme which rationally is not satisfying. That the scheme of Puritanism
is rationally so little satisfying inclines science, not to take it on
the authority of the Bible, but to doubt whether it is really in the
Bible. The first appeal which this scheme, having begun outside the
sphere of reality and experience, makes in the sphere of reality and
experience,—its first appeal, therefore, to science,—the appeal to the
witness of human hope and fear, does not much mend matters; for science
knows that numberless conceptions not rationally satisfying are yet the
ground of hope and fear.
Paul does not begin outside the sphere of science; he begins with an
appeal to reality and experience. And the appeal here with which he
commences has, for science, undoubted force and importance; for he
appeals to a rational conception which is a part, and perhaps the chief
part, of our experience; the conception of the law of righteousness,
the very law and ground of human nature so far as this nature is moral.
Things as they truly are,—facts,—are the object-matter of science; and
the moral law in human nature, however this law may have originated, is
in our actual experience among the greatest of facts.
If I were not afraid of intruding upon Mr. Ruskin's province, I might
point out the witness which etymology itself bears to this law as a
prime element and clue in man's constitution. Our word righteousness
means going straight, going the way we are meant to go; there are
languages in which the word 'way' or 'road' is also the word for right
reason and duty; the Greek word for justice and righteousness has for
its foundation, some say, the idea of describing a certain line,
following a certain necessary orbit. But for these fanciful helps there
is no need. When Paul starts with affirming the grandeur and necessity
of the law of righteousness, science has no difficulty in going along
with him. When he fixes as man's right aim 'love, joy, peace,
long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faith, mildness, self-control,'[30]
he appeals for witness to the truth of what he says to an experience too
intimate to need illustration or argument.
The best confirmation of the scientific validity of the importance which
Paul thus attaches to the law of righteousness, the law of reason and
conscience, God as moral law, is to be found in its agreement with the
importance attached to this law by teachers the most unlike him; since
in the eye of science an experience gains as much by having
universality, as in the eye of religion it seems to gain by having
uniqueness. 'Would you know,' says Epictetus, 'the means to perfection
which Socrates followed? they were these: in every single matter which
came before him he made the rule of reason and conscience his one rule
to follow.' Such was precisely the aim of Paul also; it is an aim to
which science does homage as a satisfying rational conception. And to
this aim hope and fear properly attach themselves. For on our following
the clue of moral order, or losing it, depends our happiness or misery;
our life or death in the true sense of those words; our harmony with the
universal order or our disharmony with it; our partaking, as St. Paul
says, of the wrath of God or of the glory of God. So that looking to
this clue, and fearing to lose hold on it, we may in strict scientific
truth say with the author of the Imitation: Omnia vanitas, præter amare
Deum, et illi soli servire.
But to serve God, to follow that central clue in our moral being which
unites us to the universal order, is no easy task; and here again we are
on the most sure ground of experience and psychology. In some way or
other, says Bishop Wilson, every man is conscious of an opposition in
him between the flesh and the spirit. Video meliora proboque, deteriora
sequor, say the thousand times quoted lines of the Roman poet. The
philosophical explanation of this conflict does not indeed attribute,
like the Manichæan fancy, any inherent evil to the flesh and its
workings; all the forces and tendencies in us are, like our proper
central moral tendency the desire of righteousness, in themselves
beneficent. But they require to be harmonised with this tendency,
because this aims directly at our total moral welfare,—our harmony as
moral beings with the law of our nature and the law of God,—and derives
thence a pre-eminence and a right to moderate. And, though they are not
evil in themselves, the evil which flows from these diverse workings is
undeniable. The lusts of the flesh, the law in our members, passion,
according to the Greek word used by Paul, inordinate affection,
according to the admirable rendering of Paul's Greek word in our English
Bible,[31] take naturally no account of anything but themselves; this
arbitrary and unregulated action of theirs can produce only confusion
and misery. The spirit, the law of our mind, takes account of the
universal moral order, the will of God, and is indeed the voice of that
order expressing itself in us. Paul talks of a man sowing to his
flesh,[32] because each of us has of his own this individual body, this
congeries of flesh and bones, blood and nerves, different from that of
every one else, and with desires and impulses driving each of us his own
separate way; and he says that a man who sows to this, sows to a
thousand tyrants, and can reap no worthy harvest. But he talks of sowing
to the spirit; because there is one central moral tendency which for
us and for all men is the law of our being, and through reason and
righteousness we move in this universal order and with it. In this
conformity to the will of God, as we religiously name the moral order,
is our peace and happiness.
But how to find the energy and power to bring all those self-seeking
tendencies of the flesh, those multitudinous, swarming, eager, and
incessant impulses, into obedience to the central tendency? Mere
commanding and forbidding is of no avail, and only irritates opposition
in the desires it tries to control. It even enlarges their power,
because it makes us feel our impotence; and the confusion caused by
their ungoverned working is increased by our being filled with a
deepened sense of disharmony, remorse, and dismay. 'I was alive without
the law once,'[33] says Paul; the natural play of all the forces and
desires in me went on smoothly enough so long as I did not attempt to
introduce order and regulation among them. But the condition of immoral
tranquillity could not in man be permanent. That natural law of reason
and conscience which all men have, was sufficient by itself to produce a
consciousness of rebellion and disquietude. Matters became only worse by
the exhibition of the Mosaic law, the offspring of a moral sense more
poignant and stricter, however little it might show of subtle insight
and delicacy, than the moral sense of the mass of mankind. The very
stringency of the Mosaic code increased the feeling of dismay and
helplessness; it set forth the law of righteousness more authoritatively
and minutely, yet did not supply any sufficient power to keep it.
Neither the law of nature, therefore, nor the law of Moses, availed to
blind men to righteousness. So we come to the word which is the
governing word of the Epistle to the Romans,—the word all. As the
word righteousness is the governing word of St. Paul's entire mind and
life, so the word all is the governing word of this his chief epistle.
The Gentile with the law of nature, the Jew with the law of Moses, alike
fail to achieve righteousness. 'All have sinned, and come short of the
glory of God.'[34] All do what they would not, and do not what they
would; all feel themselves enslaved, impotent, guilty, miserable. 'O
wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this
death?'[35]
Hitherto, we have followed Paul in the sphere of morals; we have now
come with him to the point where he enters the sphere of religion.
Religion is that which binds and holds us to the practice of
righteousness. We have accompanied Paul, and found him always treading
solid ground, till he is brought to straits where a binding and holding
power of this kind is necessary. Here is the critical point for the
scientific worth of his doctrine. 'Now at last,' cries Puritanism, 'the
great apostle is about to become even as one of us; there is no issue
for him now, but the issue we have always declared he finds. He has
recourse to our theurgy of election, justification, substitution, and
imputed righteousness.' We will proceed to show that Paul has recourse
to nothing of the kind.
We have seen how Puritanism seems to come by its religion in the first
instance theologically and from authority; Paul by his, on the other
hand, psychologically and from experience. Even the points, therefore,
in which they both meet, they have not reached in the same order or by
the same road. The miserable sense of sin from unrighteousness, the
joyful witness of a good conscience from righteousness, these are points
in which Puritanism and St. Paul meet. They are facts of human nature
and can be verified by science. But whereas Puritanism, so far as
science is concerned, ends with these facts, and rests the whole weight
of its antecedent theurgy upon the witness to it they offer, Paul begins
with these facts, and has not yet, so far as we have followed him,
called upon them to prove anything but themselves. The scientific
difference, as we have already remarked, which this establishes between
Paul and Puritanism is immense, and is all in Paul's favour. Sin and
righteousness, together with their eternal accompaniments of fear and
hope, misery and happiness, can prove themselves; but they can by no
means prove, also, Puritanism's history of original sin, election and
justification.
Puritanism is fond of maintaining, indeed, that Paul's doctrines derive
their sanction, not from any agreement with science and experience, but
from his miraculous conversion, and that this conversion it was which in
his own judgment gave to them their authority. But whatever sanction the
miracle of his conversion may in his own eyes have lent to the doctrines
afterwards propounded by Paul, it is clear that, for science, his
conversion adds to his doctrines no force at all which they do not
already possess in themselves. Paul's conversion is for science an event
of precisely the same nature as the conversions of which the history of
Methodism relates so many; events described, for the most part, just as
the event of Paul's conversion is described, with perfect good faith,
and which we may perfectly admit to have happened just in the manner
related, without on that account attributing to those who underwent them
any source of certitude for a scheme of doctrine which this doctrine
does not on other and better grounds possess.
Surely this proposition has only to be clearly stated in order to be
self-evident. The conversion of Paul is in itself an incident of
precisely the same order as the conversion of Sampson Staniforth, a
Methodist soldier in the campaign of Fontenoy. Staniforth himself
relates his conversion as follows, in words which bear plainly marked on
them the very stamp of good faith:—
'From twelve at night till two it was my turn to stand sentinel
at a dangerous post. I had a fellow-sentinel, but I desired him
to go away, which he willingly did. As soon as I was alone, I
knelt down and determined not to rise, but to continue crying
and wrestling with God till he had mercy on me. How long I was
in that agony I cannot tell; but as I looked up to heaven I saw
the clouds open exceeding bright, and I saw Jesus hanging on the
cross. At the same moment these words were applied to my heart:
"Thy sins are forgiven thee." All guilt was gone, and my soul
was filled with unutterable peace: the fear of death and hell
was vanished away. I was filled with wonder and astonishment. I
closed my eyes, but the impression was still the same; and for
about ten weeks, while I was awake, let me be where I would, the
same appearance was still before my eyes, and the same
impression upon my heart, Thy sins are forgiven thee.'
Not the narrative, in the Acts, of Paul's journey to Damascus, could
more convince us, as we have said, of its own honesty. But this honesty
makes nothing, as every one will admit, for the scientific truth of any
scheme of doctrine propounded by Sampson Staniforth, which must prove
itself and its own scientific value before science can admit it.
Precisely the same is it with Paul's doctrine; and we repeat, therefore,
that he and his doctrine have herein a great advantage over Puritanism,
in that, so far as we have yet followed them, they, unlike Puritanism,
rely on facts of experience and assert nothing which science cannot
verify.
We have now to see whether Paul, in passing from the undoubted facts of
experience, with which he begins, to his religion properly so called,
abandons in any essential points of his teaching the advantage with
which he started, and ends, as Puritanism commences, with a batch of
arbitrary and unscientific assumptions.
We left Paul in collision with a fact of human nature, but in itself a
sterile fact, a fact on which it is possible to dwell too long, although
Puritanism, thinking this impossible, has remained intensely absorbed in
the contemplation of it, and indeed has never properly got beyond
it,—the sense of sin. Sin is not a monster to be mused on, but an
impotence to be got rid of. All thinking about it, beyond what is
indispensable for the firm effort to get rid of it, is waste of energy
and waste of time. We then enter that element of morbid and subjective
brooding, in which so many have perished. This sense of sin, however, it
is also possible to have not strongly enough to beget the firm effort to
get rid of it, and the Greeks, with all their great gifts, had this
sense not strongly enough; its strength in the Hebrew people is one of
this people's mainsprings. And no Hebrew prophet or psalmist felt what
sin was more powerfully than Paul. 'Mine iniquities have taken hold upon
me so that I am not able to look up; they are more than the hairs of
mine head; therefore my heart faileth me.'[36] They are more than the
hairs of mine head. The motions of what Paul calls 'the law in our
members' are indeed a hydrabrood; when we are working against one fault,
a dozen others crop up without our expecting it; and this it is which
drives the man who deals seriously with himself to difficulty, nay to
despair. Paul did not need James to tell him that whoever offends on one
point is, so far at least as his own conscience and inward satisfaction
are concerned, guilty of all;[37] he knew it himself, and the unrest
this knowledge gave him was his very starting-point. He knew, too, that
nothing outward, no satisfaction of all the requirements men may make of
us, no privileges of any sort, can give peace of conscience;—of
conscience, 'whose praise is not of men but of God.'[38] He knew, also,
that the law of the moral order stretches beyond us and our private
conscience, is independent of our sense of having kept it, and stands
absolute and what in itself it is; even, therefore, though I may know
nothing against myself, yet this is not enough, I may still not be
just.[39] Finally, Paul knew that merely to know all this and say it,
is of no use, advances us nothing; 'the kingdom of God is not in word
but in power.'[40]
We have several times said that the Hebrew race apprehended God,—the
universal order by which all things fulfil the law of their
being,—chiefly as the moral order in human nature, and that it was
their greatness that they apprehended him as this so distinctly and
powerfully. But it is also characteristic of them, and perhaps it is
what mainly distinguishes their spirit from the spirit of mediæval
Christianity, that they constantly thought, too, of God as the source of
life and breath and all things, and of what they called 'fulness of
life' in all things. This way of thinking was common to them with the
Greeks; although, whereas the Greeks threw more delicacy and imagination
into it, the Hebrews threw more energy and vital warmth. But to the
Hebrew, as to the Greek, the gift of life, and health, and the world,
was divine, as well as the gift of morals. 'God's righteousness,'
indeed, 'standeth like the strong mountains, his judgments are like the
great deep; he is a righteous judge, strong and patient, who is provoked
every day.'[41] This is the Hebrew's first and deepest conception of
God,—as the source of the moral order. But God is also, to the Hebrew,
'our rock, which is higher than we,' the power by which we have been
'upholden ever since we were born,' that has 'fashioned us and laid his
hand upon us' and envelops us on every side, that has 'made us fearfully
and wonderfully,' and whose 'mercy is over all his works.'[42] He is
the power that 'saves both man and beast, gives them drink of his
pleasures as out of the river,' and with whom is 'the well of
life.'[43] In his speech at Athens, Paul shows how full he, too, was of
this feeling; and in the famous passage in the first chapter of the
Epistle to the Romans, where he asserts the existence of the natural
moral law, the source he assigns to this law is not merely God in
conscience, the righteous judge, but God in the world and the workings
of the world, the eternal and divine power from which all life and
wholesome energy proceed.[44]
This element in which we live and move and have our being, which
stretches around and beyond the strictly moral element in us, around and
beyond the finite sphere of what is originated, measured, and controlled
by our own understanding and will,—this infinite element is very
present to Paul's thoughts, and makes a profound impression on them. By
this element we are receptive and influenced, not originative and
influencing; now, we all of us receive far more than we originate. Our
pleasure from a spring day we do not make; our pleasure, even, from an
approving conscience we do not make. And yet we feel that both the one
pleasure and the other can, and often do, work with us in a wonderful
way for our good. So we get the thought of an impulsion outside
ourselves which is at once awful and beneficent. 'No man,' as the Hebrew
psalm says, 'hath quickened his own soul.'[45] 'I know,' says Jeremiah,
'that the way of man is not in himself; it is not in man that walketh to
direct his steps.'[46] Most true and natural is this feeling; and the
greater men are, the more natural is this feeling to them. Great men
like Sylla and Napoleon have loved to attribute their success to their
fortune, their star; religious great men have loved to say that their
sufficiency was of God.[47] But through every great spirit runs a train
of feeling of this sort; and the power and depth which there undoubtedly
is in Calvinism, comes from Calvinism's being overwhelmed by it. Paul is
not, like Calvinism, overwhelmed by it; but it is always before his mind
and strongly agitates his thoughts. The voluntary, rational, and human
world, of righteousness, moral choice, effort, filled the first place in
his spirit. But the necessary, mystical, and divine world, of influence,
sympathy, emotion, filled the second; and he could pass naturally from
the one world to the other. The presence in Paul of this twofold feeling
acted irresistibly upon his doctrine. What he calls 'the power that
worketh in us,'[48] and that produces results transcending all our
expectations and calculations, he instinctively sought to combine with
our personal agencies of reason and conscience.
Of such a mysterious power and its operation some clear notion may be
got by anybody who has ever had any overpowering attachment, or has
been, according to the common expression, in love. Every one knows how
being in love changes for the time a man's spiritual atmosphere, and
makes animation and buoyancy where before there was flatness and
dulness. One may even say that this is the reason why being in love is
so popular with the whole human race,—because it relieves in so
irresistible and delightful a manner the tedium or depression of
common-place human life. And not only does it change the atmosphere of
our spirits, making air, light, and movement where before was stagnation
and gloom, but it also sensibly and powerfully increases our faculties
of action. It is matter of the commonest remark how a timid man who is
in love will show courage, or an indolent man will show diligence. Nay,
a timid man who would be only the more paralysed in a moment of danger
by being told that it is his bounden duty as a man to show firmness, and
that he must be ruined and disgraced for ever if he does not, will show
firmness quite easily from being in love. An indolent man who shrinks
back from vigorous effort only the more because he is told and knows
that it is a man's business to show energy, and that it is shameful in
him if he does not, will show energy quite easily from being in love.
This, I say, we learn from the analogy of the most everyday
experience;—that a powerful attachment will give a man spirits and
confidence which he could by no means call up or command of himself; and
that in this mood he can do wonders which would not be possible to him
without it.
We have seen how Paul felt himself to be for the sake of righteousness
apprehended, to use his own expression, by Christ. 'I seek,' he says,
'to apprehend that for which also I am apprehended by Christ.'[49] This
for which he is thus apprehended is,—still to use his own words,—the
righteousness of God; not an incomplete and maimed righteousness, not a
partial and unsatisfying establishment of the law of the spirit,
dominant to-day, deposed to-morrow, effective at one or two points,
failing in a hundred; no, but an entire conformity at all points with
the divine moral order, the will of God, and, in consequence, a sense of
harmony with this order, of acceptance with God.
In some points Paul had always served this order with a clear
conscience. He did not steal, he did not commit adultery. But he was at
the same time, he says himself, 'a blasphemer and a persecutor and an
insulter,'[50] and the contemplation of Jesus Christ made him see this,
impressed it forcibly upon his mind. Here was his greatness, and the
worth of his way of appropriating Christ. We have seen how Calvinism,
too,—Calvinism which has built itself upon St. Paul,—is a blasphemer,
when it speaks of good works done by those who do not hold the Calvinist
doctrine. There would need no great sensitiveness of conscience, one
would think, to show that Calvinism has often been, also, a persecutor,
and an insulter. Calvinism, as well as Paul, professes to study Jesus
Christ. But the difference between Paul's study of Christ and
Calvinism's is this: that Paul by studying Christ got to know himself
clearly, and to transform his narrow conception of righteousness; while
Calvinism studies both Christ and Paul after him to no such good
purpose.
These, however, are but the veriest rudiments of the history of Paul's
gain from Jesus Christ, as the particular impression mentioned is but
the veriest fragment of the total impression produced by the
contemplation of Christ upon him. The sum and substance of that total
impression may best be conveyed by two words,—without sin.
We must here revert to what we have already said of the importance, for
sound criticism of a man's ideas, of the order in which his ideas come.
For us, who approach Christianity through a scholastic theology, it is
Christ's divinity which establishes his being without sin. For Paul, who
approached Christianity through his personal experience, it was Jesus
Christ's being without sin which establishes his divinity. The large and
complete conception of righteousness to which he himself had slowly and
late, and only by Jesus Christ's help, awakened, in Jesus he seemed to
see existing absolutely and naturally. The devotion to this conception
which made it meat and drink to carry it into effect, a devotion of
which he himself was strongly and deeply conscious, he saw in Jesus
still stronger, by far, and deeper than in himself. But for attaining
the righteousness of God, for reaching an absolute conformity with the
moral order and with God's will, he saw no such impotence existing in
Jesus Christ's case as in his own. For Jesus, the uncertain conflict
between the law in our members and the law of the spirit did not appear
to exist. Those eternal vicissitudes of victory and defeat, which drove
Paul to despair, in Jesus were absent. Smoothly and inevitably he
followed the real and eternal order, in preference to the momentary and
apparent order. Obstacles outside him there were plenty, but obstacles
within him there were none. He was led by the spirit of God; he was dead
to sin, he lived to God; and in this life to God he persevered even to
the cruel bodily death of the cross. As many as are led by the spirit of
God, says Paul, are the sons of God.[51] If this is so with even us,
who live to God so feebly and who render such an imperfect obedience,
how much more is he who lives to God entirely and who renders an
unalterable obedience, the unique and only Son of God?
This is undoubtedly the main line of movement which Paul's ideas
respecting Jesus Christ follow. He had been trained, however, in the
scholastic theology of Judaism, just as we are trained in the scholastic
theology of Christianity; would that we were as little embarrassed with
our training as he was with his! The Jewish theological doctrine
respecting the eternal word or wisdom of God, which was with God from
the beginning before the oldest of his works, and through which the
world was created, this doctrine, which appears in the Book of Proverbs
and again in the Book of Wisdom,[52] Paul applied to Jesus Christ, and
in the Epistle to the Colossians there is a remarkable passage[53] with
clear signs of his thus applying it. But then this metaphysical and
theological basis to the historic being of Jesus is something added by
Paul from outside to his own essential ideas concerning him, something
which fitted them and was naturally taken on to them; it is secondary,
it is not an original part of his system, much less the ground of it. It
fills a very different place in his system from the place which it fills
in the system of the author of the Fourth Gospel, who takes his
starting-point from it. Paul's starting-point, it cannot be too often
repeated, is the idea of righteousness; and his concern with Jesus is as
the clue to righteousness, not as the clue to transcendental ontology.
Speculations in this region had no overpowering attraction for Paul,
notwithstanding the traces of an acquaintance with them which we find in
his writings, and notwithstanding the great activity of his intellect.
This activity threw itself with an unerring instinct into a sphere
where, with whatever travail and through whatever impediments to clear
expression, directly practical religious results might yet be won, and
not into any sphere of abstract speculation.
Much more visible and important than his identification of Jesus with
the divine hypostasis known as the Logos, is Paul's identification of
him with the Messiah. Ever present is his recognition of him as the
Messiah to whom all the law and prophets pointed, of whom the heart of
the Jewish race was full, and on whom the Jewish instructors of Paul's
youth had dwelt abundantly. The Jewish language and ideas respecting the
end of the world and the Messiah's kingdom, his day, his presence, his
appearing, his glory, Paul applied to Jesus, and constantly used. Of the
force and reality which these ideas and expressions had for him there
can be no question; as to his use of them, only two remarks are needed.
One is, that in him these Jewish ideas,—as any one will feel who calls
to mind a genuine display of them like that in the Apocalypse,—are
spiritualised; and as he advances in his course they are spiritualised
increasingly. The other remark is, that important as these ideas are in
Paul, of them, too, the importance is only secondary, compared with that
of the great central matter of his thoughts: the righteousness of God,
the non-fulfilment of it by man, the fulfilment of it by Christ.
Once more we are led to a result favourable to the scientific value of
Paul's teaching. That Jesus Christ was the divine Logos, the second
person of the Trinity, science can neither deny nor affirm. That he was
the Jewish Messiah, who will some day appear in the sky with the sound
of trumpets, to put an end to the actual kingdoms of the world and to
establish his own kingdom, science can neither deny nor affirm. The very
terms of which these propositions are composed are such as science is
unable to handle. But that the Jesus of the Bible follows the universal
moral order and the will of God, without being let and hindered as we
are by the motions of private passion and by self-will, this is evident
to whoever can read the Bible with open eyes. It is just what any
criticism of the Gospel-history, which sees that history as it really
is, tells us; it is the scientific result of that history. And this is
the result which pre-eminently occupies Paul. Of Christ's life and
death, the all-importance for us, according to Paul, is that by means of
them, 'denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly,
righteously, and godly;' should be enabled to 'bear fruit to God' in
'love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faith, mildness,
self-control.'[54] Of Christ's life and death the scope was 'to redeem
us from all iniquity, and make us purely zealous for good works.'[55]
Paul says by way of preface, that we are to live thus in the actual
world which now is, 'with the expectation of the appearing of the glory
of God and Christ.'[56] By nature and habit, and with his full belief
that the end of the world was nigh at hand, Paul used these words to
mean a Messianic coming and kingdom. Later Christianity has transferred
them, as it has transferred so much else of Paul's, to a life beyond the
grave, but it has by no means spiritualised them. Paul, as his spiritual
growth advanced, spiritualised them more and more; he came to think, in
using them, more and more of a gradual inward transformation of the
world by a conformity like Christ's to the will of God, than of a
Messianic advent. Yet even then they are always second with him, and not
first; the essence of saving grace is always to make us righteous, to
bring us into conformity with the divine law, to enable us to 'bear
fruit to God.'
'Jesus Christ gave himself for us that he might redeem us from
iniquity.' First of all, he rendered an unbroken obedience to the law of
the spirit; he served the spirit of God; he came, not to do his own
will, but the will of God. Now, the law of the spirit makes men one; it
is only by the law in our members that we are many. Secondly, therefore,
Jesus Christ had an unfailing sense of what we have called, using an
expressive modern term, the solidarity of men: that it was not God's
will that one of his human creatures should perish. Thirdly, Jesus
Christ persevered in this uninterrupted obedience to the law of the
spirit, in this unfailing sense of human solidarity, even to the death;
though everything befell him which might break the one or tire out the
other. Lastly, he had in himself, in all he said and did, that ineffable
force of attraction which doubled the virtue of everything said or done
by him.
If ever there was a case in which the wonder-working power of
attachment, in a man for whom the moral sympathies and the desire of
righteousness were all-powerful, might employ itself and work its
wonders, it was here. Paul felt this power penetrate him; and he felt,
also, how by perfectly identifying himself through it with Jesus, and in
no other way, could he ever get the confidence and the force to do as
Jesus did. He thus found a point in which the mighty world outside man,
and the weak world inside him, seemed to combine for his salvation. The
struggling stream of duty, which had not volume enough to bear him to
his goal, was suddenly reinforced by the immense tidal wave of sympathy
and emotion.
To this new and potent influence Paul gave the name of faith. More
fully he calls it: 'Faith that worketh through love.'[57] The word
faith points, no doubt, to 'coming by hearing,' and has possibly a
reminiscence, for Paul, of his not having with his own waking eyes, like
the original disciples, seen Jesus, and of his special mission being to
Gentiles who had not seen Jesus either. But the essential meaning of the
word is 'power of holding on to the unseen,' 'fidelity.' Other
attachments demand fidelity in absence to an object which, at some time
or other, nevertheless, has been seen; this attachment demands fidelity
to an object which both is absent and has never been seen by us. It is
therefore rightly called not constancy, but faith; a power,
pre-eminently, of holding fast to an unseen power of goodness.
Identifying ourselves with Jesus Christ through this attachment we
become as he was. We live with his thoughts and feelings, and we
participate, therefore, in his freedom from the ruinous law in our
members, in his obedience to the saving law of the spirit, in his
conformity to the eternal order, in the joy and peace of his life to
God. 'The law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus,' says Paul, 'freed
me from the law of sin and death.'[58] This is what is done for us by
faith.
It is evident that some difficulty arises out of Paul's adding to the
general sense of the word faith,—a holding fast to an unseen power of
goodness,—a particular sense of his own,—identification with
Christ. It will at once appear that this faith of Paul's is in truth a
specific form of holding fast to an unseen power of goodness; and that
while it can properly be said of Abraham, for instance, that he was
justified by faith, if we take faith in its plain sense of holding fast
to an unseen power of goodness, yet it cannot without difficulty and
recourse to a strained figure be said of him, if we take faith in Paul's
specific sense of identification with Christ. Paul however, undoubtedly,
having conveyed his new specific sense into the word faith, still uses
the word in all cases where, without this specific sense, it was before
applicable and usual; and in this way he often creates ambiguity. Why,
it may be asked, does Paul, instead of employing a special term to
denote his special meaning, still thus employ the general term faith? We
are inclined to think it was from that desire to get for his words and
thoughts not only the real but also the apparent sanction and
consecration of the Hebrew Scriptures, which we have called his tendency
to Judaise. It was written of the founder of Israel, Abraham, that he
believed God and it was counted to him for righteousness. The prophet
Habakkuk had the famous text: 'The just shall live by faith.'[59]
Jesus, too, had used and sanctioned the use of the word faith to
signify cleaving to the unseen God's power of goodness as shown in
Christ.[60] Peter and John and the other apostles habitually used the
word in the same sense, with the modification introduced by Christ's
departure. This was enough to make Paul retain for that vital operation,
which was the heart of his whole religious system, the name of faith,
though he had considerably developed and enlarged the name's usual
meaning. Fraught with this new and developed sense, the term does not
always quite well suit the cases to which it was in its old sense, with
perfect propriety, applied; this, however, Paul did not regard. The term
applied with undeniable truth, though not with perfect adequacy, to the
great spiritual operation whereto he affixed it; and it was at the same
time the name given to the crowning grace of the great father of the
Jewish nation, Abraham; it was the prophet Habakkuk's talismanic and
consecrated term, faith.
In this word faith, as used by St. Paul,[61] we reach a point round
which the ceaseless stream of religious exposition and discussion has
for ages circled. Even for those who misconceive Paul's line of ideas
most completely, faith is so evidently the central point in his system
that their thoughts cannot but centre upon it. Puritanism, as is well
known, has talked of little else but faith. And the word is of such a
nature, that, the true clue once lost which Paul has given us to its
meaning, every man may put into it almost anything he likes, all the
fancies of his superstition or of his fanaticism. To say, therefore,
that to have faith in Christ means to be attached to Christ, to embrace
Christ, to be identified with Christ, is not enough; the question is, to
be attached to him how, to embrace him how?
A favourite expression of popular theology conveys perfectly the popular
definition of faith: to rest in the finished work of the Saviour. In
the scientific language of Protestant theology, to embrace Christ, to
have saving faith, is 'to give our consent heartily to the covenant of
grace, and so to receive the benefit of justification, whereby God
pardons all our sins and accepts us as righteous for the righteousness
of Christ imputed to us.' This is mere theurgy, in which, so far as we
have yet gone, we have not found Paul dealing. Wesley, with his genius
for godliness, struggled all his life for some deeper and more edifying
account of that faith, which he felt working wonders in his own soul,
than that it was a hearty consent to the covenant of grace and an
acceptance of the benefit of Christ's imputed righteousness. Yet this
amiable and gracious spirit, but intellectually slight and shallow
compared to Paul, beat his wings in vain. Paul, nevertheless, had solved
the problem for him, if only he could have had eyes to see Paul's
solution.
'He that believes in Christ,' says Wesley, 'discerns spiritual things:
he is enabled to taste, see, hear, and feel God.' There is nothing
practical and solid here. A company of Cornish revivalists will have no
difficulty in tasting, seeing, hearing, and feeling God, twenty times
over, to-night, and yet may be none the better for it to-morrow morning.
When Paul said, In Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth anything
nor uncircumcision, but faith that worketh through love; Have faith in
Christ! these words did not mean for him: 'Give your hearty belief and
consent to the covenant of grace; Accept the offered benefit of
justification through Christ's imputed righteousness.' They did not
mean: 'Try and discern spiritual things, try and taste, see, hear, and
feel God.' They did not mean: 'Rest in the finished work of Christ the
Saviour.' No, they meant: Die with him!
The object of this treatise is not religious edification, but the true
criticism of a great and misunderstood author. Yet it is impossible to
be in presence of this Pauline conception of faith without remarking on
the incomparable power of edification which it contains. It is indeed a
crowning evidence of that piercing practical religious sense which we
have attributed to Paul. It is at once mystical and rational; and it
enlists in its service the best forces of both worlds,—the world of
reason and morals, and the world of sympathy and emotion. The world of
reason and duty has an excellent clue to action, but wants motive-power;
the world of sympathy and influence has an irresistible force of
motive-power, but wants a clue for directing its exertion. The danger of
the one world is weariness in well-doing; the danger of the other is
sterile raptures and immoral fanaticism. Paul takes from both worlds
what can help him, and leaves what cannot. The elemental power of
sympathy and emotion in us, a power which extends beyond the limits of
our own will and conscious activity, which we cannot measure and
control, and which in each of us differs immensely in force, volume, and
mode of manifestation, he calls into full play, and sets it to work with
all its strength and in all its variety. But one unalterable object is
assigned by him to this power: to die with Christ to the law of the
flesh, to live with Christ to the law of the mind.
This is the doctrine of the necrosis,[62]—Paul's central doctrine,
and the doctrine which makes his profoundness and originality. His
repeated and minute lists of practices and feelings to be followed or
suppressed, now take a heightened significance. They were the matter by
which his faith tried itself and knew itself. Those multitudinous
motions of appetite and self-will which reason and conscience
disapproved, reason and conscience could yet not govern, and had to
yield to them. This, as we have seen, is what drove Paul almost to
despair. Well, then, how did Paul's faith, working through love, help
him here? It enabled him to reinforce duty by affection. In the central
need of his nature, the desire to govern these motions of
unrighteousness, it enabled him to say: Die to them! Christ did. If
any man be in Christ, said Paul—that is, if any man identifies himself
with Christ by attachment so that he enters into his feelings and lives
with his life,—he is a new creature;[63] he can do, and does, what
Christ did. First, he suffers with him. Christ throughout his life and
in his death presented his body a living sacrifice to God; every
self-willed impulse blindly trying to assert itself without respect of
the universal order, he died to. You, says Paul to his disciple, are to
do the same. Never mind how various and multitudinous the impulses are;
impulses to intemperance, concupiscence, covetousness, pride, sloth,
envy, malignity, anger, clamour, bitterness, harshness, unmercifulness.
Die to them all, and to each as it comes! Christ did. If you cannot,
your attachment, your faith, must be one that goes but a very little
way. In an ordinary human attachment, out of love to a woman, out of
love to a friend, out of love to a child, you can suppress quite easily,
because by sympathy you enter into their feelings, this or that impulse
of selfishness which happens to conflict with them, and which hitherto
you have obeyed. All impulses of selfishness conflict with Christ's
feelings, he showed it by dying to them all; if you are one with him by
faith and sympathy, you can die to them also. Then, secondly, if you
thus die with him, you become transformed by the renewing of your mind,
and rise with him. The law of the spirit of life which is in Christ
becomes the law of your life also, and frees you from the law of sin and
death. You rise with him to that harmonious conformity with the real and
eternal order, that sense of pleasing God who trieth the hearts, which
is life and peace, and which grows more and more till it becomes glory.
If you suffer with him, therefore, you shall also be glorified with him.
The real worth of this mystical conception depends on the fitness of the
character and history of Jesus Christ for inspiring such an enthusiasm
of attachment and devotion as that which Paul's notion of faith implies.
If the character and history are eminently such as to inspire it, then
Paul has no doubt found a mighty aid towards the attainment of that
righteousness of which Jesus Christ's life afforded the admirable
pattern. A great solicitude is always shown by popular Christianity to
establish a radical difference between Jesus and a teacher, like
Socrates. Ordinary theologians establish this difference by
transcendental distinctions into which science cannot follow them. But
what makes for science the radical difference between Jesus and
Socrates, is that such a conception as Paul's would, if applied to
Socrates, be out of place and ineffective. Socrates inspired boundless
friendship and esteem; but the inspiration of reason and conscience is
the one inspiration which comes from him, and which impels us to live
righteously as he did. A penetrating enthusiasm of love, sympathy, pity,
adoration, reinforcing the inspiration of reason and duty, does not
belong to Socrates. With Jesus it is different. On this point it is
needless to argue; history has proved. In the midst of errors the most
prosaic, the most immoral, the most unscriptural, concerning God,
Christ, and righteousness, the immense emotion of love and sympathy
inspired by the person and character of Jesus has had to work almost by
itself alone for righteousness; and it has worked wonders. The
surpassing religious grandeur of Paul's conception of faith is that it
seizes a real salutary emotional force of incalculable magnitude, and
reinforces moral effort with it.
Paul's mystical conception is not complete without its relation of us to
our fellow-men, as well as its relation of us to Jesus Christ. Whoever
identifies himself with Christ, identifies himself with Christ's idea of
the solidarity of men. The whole race is conceived as one body, having
to die and rise with Christ, and forming by the joint action of its
regenerate members the mystical body of Christ. Hence the truth of that
which Bishop Wilson says: 'It is not so much our neighbour's interest as
our own that we love him.' Jesus Christ's life, with which we by faith
identify ourselves, is not complete, his aspiration after the eternal
order is not satisfied, so long as only Jesus himself follows this
order, or only this or that individual amongst us men follows it. The
same law of emotion and sympathy, therefore, which prevails in our
inward self-discipline, is to prevail in our dealings with others. The
motions of sin in ourselves we succeed in mortifying, not by saying to
ourselves that they are sinful, but by sympathy with Christ in his
mortification of them. In like manner, our duties towards our neighbour
we perform, not in deference to external commands and prohibitions, but
through identifying ourselves with him by sympathy with Christ who
identified himself with him. Therefore, we owe no man anything but to
love one another; and he who loves his neighbour fulfils the law towards
him, because he seeks to do him good and forbears to do him harm just as
if he was himself.
Mr. Lecky cannot see that the command to speak the truth to one's
neighbour is a command which has a natural sanction. But according to
these Pauline ideas it has a clear natural sanction. For, if my
neighbour is merely an extension of myself, deceiving my neighbour is
the same as deceiving myself; and than self-deceit there is nothing by
nature more baneful. And on this ground Paul puts the injunction. He
says: 'Speak every man truth to his neighbour, for we are members one
of another.'[64] This direction to identify ourselves in Jesus Christ
with our neighbours is hard and startling, no doubt, like the direction
to identify ourselves with Jesus and die with him. But it is also, like
that direction, inspiring; and not, like a set of mere mechanical
commands and prohibitions, lifeless and unaiding. It shows a profound
practical religious sense, and rests upon facts of human nature which
experience can follow and appreciate.
The three essential terms of Pauline theology are not, therefore, as
popular theology makes them: calling, justification,
sanctification. They are rather these: dying with Christ,
resurrection from the dead, growing into Christ.[65] The order in
which these terms are placed indicates, what we have already pointed out
elsewhere, the true Pauline sense of the expression, resurrection from
the dead. In Paul's ideas the expression has no essential connexion
with physical death. It is true, popular theology connects it with this
almost exclusively, and regards any other use of it as purely figurative
and secondary. For popular theology, Christ's resurrection is his bodily
resurrection on earth after his physical death on the cross; the
believer's resurrection is his bodily resurrection in a future world,
the golden city of our hymns and of the Apocalypse. For this theology,
the force of Christ's resurrection is that it is a miracle which
guarantees the promised future miracle of our own resurrection. It is a
common remark with Biblical critics, even with able and candid Biblical
critics, that Christ's resurrection, in this sense of a physical
miracle, is the central object of Paul's thoughts and the foundation of
all his theology. Nay, the preoccupation with this idea has altered the
very text of our documents; so that whereas Paul wrote, 'Christ died and
lived,' we read, 'Christ died and rose again and revived.'[66] But
whoever has carefully followed Paul's line of thought as we have
endeavoured to trace it, will see that in his mature theology, as the
Epistle to the Romans exhibits it, it cannot be this physical and
miraculous aspect of the resurrection which holds the first place in his
mind; for under this aspect the resurrection does not fit in with the
ideas which he is developing.
Not for a moment do we deny that in Paul's earlier theology, and notably
in the Epistles to the Thessalonians and Corinthians, the physical and
miraculous aspect of the resurrection, both Christ's and the believer's,
is primary and predominant. Not for a moment do we deny that to the very
end of his life, after the Epistle to the Romans, after the Epistle to
the Philippians, if he had been asked whether he held the doctrine of
the resurrection in the physical and miraculous sense, as well as in his
own spiritual and mystical sense, he would have replied with entire
conviction that he did. Very likely it would have been impossible to him
to imagine his theology without it. But:—
Below the surface-stream, shallow and light,
Of what we say we feel—below the stream,
As light, of what we think we feel—there flows
With noiseless current strong, obscure and deep,
The central stream of what we feel indeed;
|
and by this alone are we truly characterised. Paul's originality lies in
the effort to find a moral side and significance for all the processes,
however mystical, of the religious life, with a view of strengthening,
in this way, their hold upon us and their command of all our nature.
Sooner or later he was sure to be drawn to treat the process of
resurrection with this endeavour. He did so treat it; and what is
original and essential in him is his doing so.
Paul's conception of life and death inevitably came to govern his
conception of resurrection. What indeed, as we have seen, is for Paul
life, and what is death? Not the ordinary physical life and death.
Death, for him, is living after the flesh, obedience to sin; life is
mortifying by the spirit the deeds of the flesh, obedience to
righteousness. Resurrection, in its essential sense, is therefore for
Paul, the rising, within the sphere of our visible earthly existence,
from death in this sense to life in this sense. It is indubitable that,
so far as the human believer's resurrection is concerned, this is so.
Else, how could Paul say to the Colossians (to take only one out of a
hundred clear texts showing the same thing): 'If ye then be risen with
Christ, seek the things that are above.'[67] But when Paul repeats
again and again, in the Epistle to the Romans, that the matter of our
faith is 'that God raised Jesus from the dead,' the essential meaning of
this resurrection, also, is just the same. Real life for Paul, begins
with the mystical death which frees us from the dominion of the external
shalls and shall nots of the law.[68] From the moment, therefore,
that Jesus Christ was content to do God's will, he died. Paul's point
is, that Jesus Christ in his earthly existence obeyed the law of the
spirit and bore fruit to God; and that the believer should, in his
earthly existence, do the same. That Christ 'died to sin,' that he
'pleased not himself,' and that, consequently, through all his life
here, he was risen and living to God, is what occupies Paul. Christ's
physical resurrection after he was crucified is neither in point of time
nor in point of character the resurrection on which Paul, following his
essential line of thought, wanted to fix the believer's mind. The
resurrection Paul was striving after for himself and others was a
resurrection now, and a resurrection to righteousness.[69]
But Jesus Christ's obeying God and not pleasing himself culminated in
his death on the cross. All through his career, indeed, Jesus Christ
pleased not himself and died to sin. But so smoothly and so inevitably,
as we have before said, did he always appear to follow that law of the
moral order, which to us it costs such effort to obey, that only in the
very wrench and pressure of his violent death did any pain of dying, any
conflict between the law of the flesh and the law of the spirit, in
Christ become visible. But the Christian needs to find in Christ's dying
to sin a fellowship of suffering and a conformity of death. Well, then,
the point of Christ's trial and crucifixion is the only point in his
career where the Christian can palpably touch what he seeks. In all
dying there is struggle and weakness; in our dying to sin there is great
struggle and weakness. But only in his crucifixion can we see, in Jesus
Christ, a place for struggle and weakness.[70] That self-sacrificing
obedience of Jesus Christ's whole life, which was summed up in this
great, final act of his crucifixion, and which is palpable as sacrifice,
obedience, dolorous effort, only there, is, therefore, constantly
regarded by Paul under the figure of this final act, as is also the
believer's conformity to Christ's obedience. The believer is crucified
with Christ when he mortifies by the spirit the deeds of
unrighteousness; Christ was crucified when he pleased not himself, and
came to do not his own will but God's.
It is the same with life as with death; it turns on no physical event,
but on that central concern of Paul's thoughts, righteousness. If we
have the spirit of Christ, we live, as he did, by the spirit, 'serve the
spirit of God,'[71] and follow the eternal order. The spirit of God,
the spirit of Christ is the same,—the one eternal moral order. If we
are led by the spirit of God we are the sons of God, and share with
Christ the heritage of the sons of God,—eternal life, peace, felicity,
glory. The spirit, therefore, is life because of righteousness. And
when, through identifying ourselves with Christ, we reach Christ's
righteousness, then eternal life begins for us;—a continuous and
ascending life, for the eternal order never dies, and the more we
transform ourselves into servants of righteousness and organs of the
eternal order, the more we are and desire to be this eternal order and
nothing else. Even in this life we are 'seated in heavenly places,'[72]
as Christ is; so entirely, for Paul, is righteousness the true life and
the true heaven. But the transformation cannot be completed here; the
physical death is regarded by Paul as a stage at which it ceases to be
impeded. However, at this stage we quit, as he himself says, the ground
of experience and enter upon the ground of hope. But, by a sublime
analogy, he fetches from the travail of the whole universe proof of the
necessity and beneficence of the law of transformation. Jesus Christ
entered into his glory when he had made his physical death itself a
crowning witness to his obedience to righteousness; we, in like manner,
within the limits of this earthly life and before we have yet persevered
to the end, must not look for full adoption, for the glorious revelation
in us of the sons of God.[73]
That Paul, as we have said, accepted the physical miracle of Christ's
resurrection and ascension as a part of the signs and wonders which
accompanied Christianity, there can be no doubt. Just in the same manner
he accepted the eschatology, as it is called, of his nation,—their
doctrine of the final things and of the summons by a trumpet in the sky
to judgment; he accepted Satan, hierarchies of angels, and an
approaching end of the world. What we deny is, that his acceptance of
the former gives to his teaching its essential characters, any more than
his acceptance of the latter. We should but be continuing, with strict
logical development, Paul's essential line of thought, if we said that
the true ascension and glorified reign of Christ was the triumph and
reign of his spirit, of his real life, far more operative after his
death on the cross than before it; and that in this sense, most truly,
he and all who persevere to the end as he did are 'sown in weakness but
raised in power.' Paul himself, however, did not distinctly continue his
thought thus, and neither will we do so for him. How far Paul himself
knew that he had gone in his irresistible bent to find, for each of the
data of his religion, that side of moral and spiritual significance
which, as a mere sign and wonder, it had not and could not have,—what
data he himself was conscious of having transferred, through following
this bent, from the first rank in importance to the second,—we cannot
know with any certainty. That the bent existed, that Paul felt it
existed, and that it establishes a wide difference between the earliest
epistles and the latest, is beyond question. Already, in the Second
Epistle to the Corinthians, he declares that, 'though he had known
Christ after the flesh, yet henceforth he knew him so no more;'[74] and
in the Epistle to the Romans, shortly afterwards, he rejects the notion
of dwelling on the miraculous Christ, on the descent into hell and on
the ascent into heaven, and fixes the believer's attention solely on the
faith of Christ and on the effects produced by an acquaintance with
it.[75] In the same Epistle, in like manner, the kingdom of God, of
which to the Thessalonians he described the advent in such materialising
and popularly Judaic language, has become 'righteousness, and peace, and
joy in the holy spirit.'[76]
These ideas, we repeat, may never have excluded others, which absorbed
the most part of Paul's contemporaries as they absorb popular religion
at this day. To popular religion, the real kingdom of God is the New
Jerusalem with its jaspers and emeralds; righteousness and peace and joy
are only the kingdom of God figuratively. The real sitting in heavenly
places is the sitting on thrones in a land of pure delight after we are
dead; serving the spirit of God is only sitting in heavenly places
figuratively. Science exactly reverses this process. For science, the
spiritual notion is the real one, the material notion is figurative. The
astonishing greatness of Paul is, that, coming when and where and whence
he did, he yet grasped the spiritual notion, if not exclusively and
fully, yet firmly and predominantly; more and more predominantly through
all the last years of his life. And what makes him original and himself,
is not what he shares with his contemporaries and with modern popular
religion, but this which he develops of his own; and this which he
develops of his own is just of a nature to make his religion a theology
instead of a theurgy, and at bottom a scientific instead of a
non-scientific structure. 'Die and come to life!' says Goethe,—an
unsuspected witness, assuredly, to the psychological and scientific
profoundness of Paul's conception of life and death:—'Die and come to
life! for, so long as this is not accomplished, thou art but a troubled
guest upon an earth of gloom.'[77]
The three cardinal points in Paul's theology are not therefore, we
repeat, those commonly assigned by Puritanism, calling,
justification, sanctification; but they are these: dying with
Christ, resurrection from the dead, growing into Christ. And we
will venture, moreover, to affirm that the more the Epistle to the
Romans is read and re-read with a clear mind, the more will the
conviction strengthen, that the sense indicated by the order in which we
here class the second main term of Paul's conception, is the essential
sense which Paul himself attaches to this term, in every single place
where in that Epistle he has used it. Not tradition and not theory, but
a simple impartial study of the development of Paul's central line of
thought, brings us to the conclusion, that from the very outset of the
Epistle, where Paul speaks of Christ as 'declared to be the son of God
with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the
dead,'[78] to the very end, the essential sense in which Paul uses the
term resurrection is that of a rising, in this visible earthly
existence, from the death of obedience to blind selfish impulse, to the
life of obedience to the eternal moral order;—in Christ's case first,
as the pattern for us to follow; in the believer's case afterwards, as
following Christ's pattern through identifying himself with him.
We have thus reached Paul's fundamental conception without even a
glimpse of the fundamental conceptions of Puritanism, which,
nevertheless, professes to have learnt its doctrine from St. Paul and
from his Epistle to the Romans. Once, for a moment, the term faith
brought us in contact with the doctrine of Puritanism, but only to see
that the essential sense given to this word by Paul Puritanism had
missed entirely. Other parts, then, of the Epistle to the Romans than
those by which we have been occupied must have chiefly fixed the
attention of Puritanism. And so it has in truth been. Yet the parts of
the Epistle to the Romans that have occupied us are undoubtedly the
parts which not our own theories and inclinations,—for we have
approached the matter without any,—but an impartial criticism of Paul's
real line of thought, must elevate as the most important. If a somewhat
pedantic form of expression may be forgiven for the sake of clearness,
we may say that of the eleven first chapters of the Epistle to the
Romans,—the chapters which convey Paul's theology, though not, as we
have seen, with any scholastic purpose or in any formal scientific mode
of exposition,—of these eleven chapters, the first, second, and third
are, in a scale of importance fixed by a scientific criticism of Paul's
line of thought, sub-primary; the fourth and fifth are secondary; the
sixth and eighth are primary; the seventh chapter is sub-primary; the
ninth, tenth, and eleventh chapters are secondary. Furthermore, to the
contents of the separate chapters themselves this scale must be carried
on, so far as to mark that of the two great primary chapters, the sixth
and the eighth, the eighth is primary down only to the end of the
twenty-eighth verse; from thence to the end it is, however eloquent, yet
for the purpose of a scientific criticism of Paul's essential theology,
only secondary.
The first chapter is to the Gentiles. Its purport is: You have not
righteousness. The second is to the Jews; and its purport is: No more
have you, though you think you have. The third chapter announces faith
in Christ as the one source of righteousness for all men. The fourth
chapter gives to the notion of righteousness through faith the sanction
of the Old Testament and of the history of Abraham. The fifth insists on
the causes for thankfulness and exultation in the boon of righteousness
through faith in Christ; and applies illustratively, with this design,
the history of Adam. The sixth chapter comes to the all-important
question: 'What is that faith in Christ which I, Paul, mean?'—and
answers it. The seventh illustrates and explains the answer. But the
eighth, down to the end of the twenty-eighth verse, develops and
completes the answer. The rest of the eighth chapter expresses the sense
of safety and gratitude which the solution is fitted to inspire. The
ninth, tenth, and eleventh chapters uphold the second chapter's
thesis,—so hard to a Jew, so easy to us,—that righteousness is not by
the Jewish law; but dwell with hope and joy on a final result of things
which is to be favourable to Israel.
We shall be pardoned this somewhat formal analysis in consideration of
the clearness with which it enables us to survey the Puritan scheme of
original sin, predestination, and justification. The historical
transgression of Adam occupies, it will be observed, in Paul's ideas by
no means the primary, fundamental, all-important place which it holds in
the ideas of Puritanism. 'This' (the transgression of Adam) 'is our
original sin, the bitter root of all our actual transgressions in
thought, word, and deed.' Ah, no! Paul did not go to the Book of Genesis
to get the real testimony about sin. He went to experience for it. 'I
see,' he says, 'a law in my members fighting against the law of my
mind, and bringing me into captivity.'[79] This is the essential
testimony respecting the rise of sin to Paul,—this rise of it in his
own heart and in the heart of all the men who hear him. At quite a later
stage in his conception of the religious life, in quite a subordinate
capacity, and for the mere purpose of illustration, comes in the
allusion to Adam and to what is called original sin. Paul's desire for
righteousness has carried him to Christ and to the conception of the
righteousness which is of God by faith, and he is expressing his
gratitude, delight, wonder, at the boon he has discovered. For the
purpose of exalting it he reverts to the well-known story of Adam. It
cannot even be said that Paul Judaises in his use here of this story; so
entirely does he subordinate it to his purpose of illustration, using it
just as he might have used it had he believed, which undoubtedly he did
not, that it was merely a symbolical legend, having the advantage of
being perfectly familiar to himself and his hearers. 'Think,' he says,
'how in Adam's fall one man's one transgression involved all men in
punishment; then estimate the blessedness of our boon in Christ, where
one man's one righteousness involves a world of transgressors in
blessing![80] This is not a scientific doctrine of corruption inherited
through Adam's fall; it is a rhetorical use of Adam's fall in a passing
allusion to it.
We come to predestination. We have seen how strong was Paul's
consciousness of that power, not ourselves, in which we live and move
and have our being. The sense of life, peace, and joy, which comes
through identification with Christ, brings with it a deep and grateful
consciousness that this sense is none of our own getting and making. No,
it is grace, it is the free gift of God, who gives abundantly beyond all
that we ask or think, and calls things that are not as though they were.
'It is not of him that willeth or of him that runneth, but of God that
showeth mercy.'[81] As moral agents, for whom alone exist all the
predicaments of merit and demerit, praise and blame, effort and failure,
vice and virtue, we are impotent and lost;—we are saved through that in
us which is passive and involuntary; we are saved through our
affections, it is as beings acted upon and influenced that we are
saved! Well might Paul cry out, as this mystical but profound and
beneficent conception filled his soul: 'All things work together for
good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his
purpose.'[82] Well might he say, in the gratitude which cannot find
words enough to express its sense of boundless favour, that those who
reached peace with God through identification with Christ were vessels
of mercy, marked from endless ages; that they had been foreknown,
predestinated, called, justified, glorified.
It may be regretted, for the sake of the clear understanding of his
essential doctrine, that Paul did not stop here. It might seem as if the
word 'prothesis,' purpose, lured him on into speculative mazes, and
involved him, at last, in an embarrassment, from which he impatiently
tore himself by the harsh and unedifying image of the clay and the
potter. But this is not so. These allurements of speculation, which have
been fatal to so many of his interpreters, never mastered Paul. He was
led into difficulty by the tendency which we have already noticed as
making his real imperfection both as a thinker and as a writer,—the
tendency to Judaise.
Already, in the fourth chapter, this tendency had led him to seem to
rest his doctrine of justification by faith upon the case of Abraham,
whereas, in truth, it needs all the good will in the world, and some
effort of ingenuity, even to bring the case of Abraham within the
operation of this doctrine. That righteousness is life, that all men by
themselves fail of righteousness, that only through identification with
Jesus Christ can they reach it,—these propositions, for us at any rate,
prove themselves much better than they are proved by the thesis that
Abraham in old age believed God's promise that his seed should yet be as
the stars for multitude, and that this was counted to him for
righteousness. The sanction thus apparently given to the idea that faith
is a mere belief, or opinion of the mind, has put thousands of Paul's
readers on a false track.
But Paul's Judaising did not end here. To establish his doctrine of
righteousness by faith, he had to eradicate the notion that his people
were specially privileged, and that, having the Mosaic law, they did not
need anything farther. For us, this one verse of the tenth chapter:
There is no difference between Jew and Greek, for it is the same Lord
of all, who is rich to all that call upon him,—and these four words of
another verse: For righteousness, heart-faith necessary!—effect far
more for Paul's object than his three chapters bristling with Old
Testament quotations. By quotation, however, he was to proceed, in order
to invest his doctrine with the talismanic virtues of a verbal sanction
from the law and the prophets. He shows, therefore, that the law and the
prophets had said that only a remnant, an elect remnant, of Israel
should be saved, and that the rest should be blinded. But to say that
peace with God through Jesus Christ inspires such an abounding sense of
gratitude, and of its not being our work, that we can only speak of
ourselves as called and chosen to it, is one thing; in so speaking,
we are on the ground of personal experience. To say, on the other hand,
that God has blinded and reprobated other men, so that they shall not
reach this blessing, is to quit the ground of personal experience, and
to begin employing the magnified and non-natural man in the next street.
We then require, in order to account for his proceedings, such an
analogy as that of the clay and the potter.
This is Calvinism, and St. Paul undoubtedly falls into it. But the
important thing to remark is, that this Calvinism, which with the
Calvinist is primary, is with Paul secondary, or even less than
secondary. What with Calvinists is their fundamental idea, the centre of
their theology, is for Paul an idea added to his central ideas, and
extraneous to them; brought in incidentally, and due to the necessities
of a bad mode of recommending and enforcing his thesis. It is as if
Newton had introduced into his exposition of the law of gravitation an
incidental remark, perhaps erroneous, about light or colours; and we
were then to make this remark the head and front of Newton's law. The
theological idea of reprobation was an idea of Jewish theology as of
ours, an idea familiar to Paul and a part of his training, an idea which
probably he never consciously abandoned. But its complete secondariness
in him is clearly established by other considerations than those which
we have drawn from the place and manner of his introduction of it. The
very phrase about the clay and the potter is not Paul's own; he does but
repeat a stock theological figure. Isaiah had said: 'O Lord, we are the
clay, and thou our potter, and we are all the work of thy hand.'[83]
Jeremiah had said, in the Lord's name, to Israel: 'Behold, as the clay
in the potter's hand, so are ye in mine hand, O house of Israel.'[84]
And the son of Sirach comes yet nearer to Paul's very words: 'As the
clay is in the potter's hand to fashion it at his pleasure, so man is in
the hand of him that made him, to render to them as liketh him
best.'[85] Is an original man's essential, characteristic idea, that
which he adopts thus bodily from some one else? But take Paul's truly
essential idea. 'We are buried with Christ through baptism into death,
that like as he was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father,
even so we also shall walk in newness of life.'[86] Did Jeremiah say
that? Is any one the author of it except Paul? Then there should
Calvinism have looked for Paul's secret, and not in the commonplace
about the potter and the vessels of wrath. A commonplace which is so
entirely a commonplace to him, that he contradicts it even while he is
Judaising; for in the very batch of chapters we are discussing he says:
'Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.'[87]
Still more clear is, on this point, his real mind, when he is not
Judaising: 'God is the saviour of all men, specially of those that
believe.'[88] And anything, finally, which might seem dangerous in the
grateful sense of a calling, choosing, and leading by eternal
goodness,—a notion as natural as the Calvinistic doctrine of
predestination is monstrous,—Paul abundantly supplies in more than one
striking passage; as, for instance, in that incomparable third chapter
of the Philippians (from which, and from the sixth and eighth chapters
of the Romans, Paul's whole theology, if all his other writings were
lost, might be reconstructed), where he expresses his humble
consciousness that the mystical resurrection which is his aim, glory,
and salvation, he does not yet, and cannot, completely attain.
The grand doctrine, then, which Calvinistic Puritanism has gathered from
Paul, turns out to be a secondary notion of his, which he himself, too,
has contradicted or corrected. But, at any rate, 'Christ meritoriously
obtained eternal redemption for us.' 'If there be anything,' the
quarterly organ of Puritanism has lately told us in its hundredth
number, 'that human experience has made certain, it is that man can
never outgrow his necessity for the great truths and provisions of the
Incarnation and the sacrificial Atonement of the Divine Son of God.'
God, his justice being satisfied by Christ's bearing according to
compact our guilt and dying in our stead, is appeased and set free to
exercise towards us his mercy, and to justify and sanctify us in
consideration of Christ's righteousness imputed to us, if we give our
hearty belief and consent to the satisfaction thus made. This hearty
belief being given, 'we rest,' to use the consecrated expression already
quoted, 'in the finished work of a Saviour.' This doctrine of imputed
righteousness is now, as predestination formerly was, the favourite
thesis of popular Protestant theology. And, like the doctrine of
predestination, it professes to be specially derived from St. Paul.
But whoever has followed attentively the main line of St. Paul's
theology, as we have tried to show it, will see at once that in St.
Paul's essential ideas this popular notion of a substitution, and
appeasement, and imputation of alien merit, has no place. Paul knows
nothing of a sacrificial atonement; what Paul knows of is a reconciling
sacrifice. The true substitution, for Paul, is not the substitution of
Jesus Christ in men's stead as victim on the cross to God's offended
justice; it is the substitution by which the believer, in his own
person, repeats Jesus Christ's dying to sin. Paul says, in real truth,
to our Puritans with their magical and mechanical salvation, just what
he said to the men of circumcision: 'If I preach resting in the finished
work of a Saviour, why am I yet persecuted? why do I die daily? then is
the stumbling-block of the cross annulled.'[89] That hard, that
well-nigh impossible doctrine, that our whole course must be a
crucifixion and a resurrection, even as Christ's whole course was a
crucifixion and a resurrection, becomes superfluous. Yet this is my
central doctrine.'
The notion of God as a magnified and non-natural man, appeased by a
sacrifice and remitting in consideration of it his wrath against those
who had offended him,—this notion of God, which science repels, was
equally repelled, in spite of all that his nation, time, and training
had in them to favour it, by the profound religious sense of Paul. In
none of his epistles is the reconciling work of Christ really presented
under this aspect. One great epistle there is, however, which does
apparently present it under this aspect,—the Epistle to the Hebrews.
Paul's phraseology, and even the central idea which he conveys in that
phraseology, were evidently well known to the writer of the Epistle to
the Hebrews. Nay, if we merely sought to prove a thesis, rather than to
ascertain the real bearing of the documents we canvass, we should have
no difficulty in making it appear, by texts taken from the Epistle to
the Hebrews, that the doctrine of this epistle, no less than the
doctrine of the Epistle to the Romans, differs entirely from the common
doctrine of Puritanism. This, however, we shall by no means do; because
it is our honest opinion that the popular doctrine of 'the sacrificial
Atonement of the Divine Son of God' derives, if not a real, yet at any
rate a strong apparent sanction from the Epistle to the Hebrews. Even
supposing, what is probably true, that the popular doctrine is really
the doctrine neither of the one epistle nor of the other, yet it must be
confessed that while it is the reader's fault,—a fault due to his fixed
prepossessions, and to his own want of penetration,—if he gets the
popular doctrine out of the Epistle to the Romans, it is on the other
hand the writer's fault and no longer the reader's, if out of the
Epistle to the Hebrews he gets the popular doctrine. For the author of
that epistle is, if not subjugated, yet at least preponderantly occupied
by the idea of the Jewish system of sacrifices, and of the analogies to
Christ's sacrifice which are furnished by that system.
If other proof were wanting, this alone would make it impossible that
the Epistle to the Hebrews should be Paul's; and indeed of all the
epistles which bear his name, it is the only one which we may not,
perhaps, in spite of the hesitation caused by grave difficulties, be
finally content to leave in considerable part to him.[90] Luther's
conjecture, which ascribes to Apollos the Epistle to the Hebrews,
derives corroboration from the one account of Apollos which we have;
that 'he was an eloquent man and mighty in the Scriptures.' The Epistle
to the Hebrews is just such a performance as might naturally have come
from an eloquent man and mighty in the Scriptures; in whom the
intelligence, and the powers of combining, type-finding, and expounding,
somewhat dominated the religious perceptions. The Epistle to the Hebrews
is full of beauty and power; and what may be called the exterior conduct
of its argument is as able and satisfying as Paul's exterior conduct of
his argument is generally embarrassed. Its details are full of what is
edifying; but its apparent central conception of Christ's death, as a
perfect sacrifice which consummated the imperfect sacrifices of the
Jewish law, is a mere notion of the understanding, and is not a
religious idea. Turn it which way we will, the notion of appeasement of
an offended God by vicarious sacrifice, which the Epistle to the Hebrews
apparently sanctions, will never truly speak to the religious sense, or
bear fruit for true religion. It is no blame to Apollos if he was
somewhat overpowered by this notion, for the whole world was full of it,
up to his time, in his time, and since his time; and it has driven
theologians before it like sheep. The wonder is, not that Apollos should
have adopted it, but that Paul should have been enabled, through the
incomparable power and energy of religious perception informing his
intellectual perception, in reality to put it aside. Figures drawn from
the dominant notion of sacrificial appeasement he used, for the notion
has so saturated the imagination and language of humanity that its
figures pass naturally and irresistibly into all our speech. Popular
Puritanism consists of the apparent doctrine from the Epistle to the
Hebrews, set forth with Paul's figures. But the doctrine itself Paul had
really put aside, and had substituted for it a better.
The term sacrifice, in men's natural use of it, contains three
notions: the notion of winning the favour or buying off the wrath of a
powerful being by giving him something precious; the notion of parting
with something naturally precious; and the notion of expiation, not now
in the sense of buying off wrath or satisfying a claim, but of suffering
in that wherein we have sinned. The first notion is, at bottom, merely
superstitious, and belongs to the ignorant and fear-ridden childhood of
humanity; it is the main element, however, in the Puritan conception of
justification. The second notion explains itself; it is the main element
in the Pauline conception of justification. Jesus parted with what, to
men in general, is the most precious of things,—individual self and
selfishness; he pleased not himself, obeyed the spirit of God, died to
sin and to the law in our members, consummated upon the cross this
death; here is Paul's essential notion of Christ's sacrifice.
The third notion may easily be misdealt with, but it has a profound
truth; in Paul's conception of justification there is much of it. In
some way or other, he who would 'cease from sin' must nearly always
'suffer in the flesh.' It is found to be true, that 'without shedding of
blood is no remission.' 'If you can be good with pleasure,' says Bishop
Wilson with his genius of practical religious sense, 'God does not envy
you your joy; but such is our corruption, that every man cannot be so.'
The substantial basis of the notion of expiation, so far as we ourselves
are concerned, is the bitter experience that the habit of wrong, of
blindly obeying selfish impulse, so affects our temper and powers, that
to withstand selfish impulse, to do right, when the sense of right
awakens in us, requires an effort out of all proportion to the actual
present emergency. We have not only the difficulty of the present act in
itself, we have the resistance of all our past; fire and the knife,
cautery and amputation, are often necessary in order to induce a vital
action, which, if it were not for our corrupting past, we might have
obtained from the natural healthful vigour of our moral organs. This is
the real basis of our personal sense of the need of expiating, and thus
it is that man expiates.
Not so the just, who is man's ideal. He has no indurated habit of wrong,
no perverse temper, no enfeebled powers, no resisting past, no spiritual
organs gangrened, no need of the knife and fire; smoothly and inevitably
he follows the eternal order, and hereto belongs happiness. What sins,
then, has the just to expiate?—ours. In truth, men's habitual
unrighteousness, their hard and careless breaking of the moral law, do
so tend to reduce and impair the standard of goodness, that, in order to
keep this standard pure and unimpaired, the righteous must actually
labour and suffer far more than would be necessary if men were better.
In the first place, he has to undergo our hatred and persecution for his
justice. In the second place, he has to make up for the harm caused by
our continual shortcomings, to step between us foolish transgressors and
the destructive natural consequences of our transgression, and, by a
superhuman example, a spending himself without stint, a more than mortal
scale of justice and purity, to save the ideal of human life and conduct
from the deterioration with which men's ordinary practice threatens it.
In this way Jesus Christ truly 'became for our sakes poor, though he was
rich,' he was truly 'bruised for our iniquities,' he 'suffered in our
behoof,' 'bare the sin of many,' and 'made intercession for the
transgressors.'[91] In this way, truly, 'he was sacrificed as a
blameless lamb to redeem us from the vain conversation which had become
our second nature;'[92] in this way, 'he was made to be sin for us, who
knew no sin.'[93] Such, according to that true and profound perception
of the import of Christ's sufferings, which, in all St. Paul's writings,
and in the inestimable First Epistle of St. Peter, is presented to us,
is the expiation of Christ.
The notion, therefore, of satisfying and appeasing an angry God's
wrath, does not come into Paul's real conception of Jesus Christ's
sacrifice. Paul's foremost notion of this sacrifice is, that by it Jesus
died to the law of selfish impulse, parted with what to men in general
is most precious and near. Paul's second notion is, that whereas Jesus
suffered in doing this, his suffering was not his fault, but ours; not
for his good, but for ours. In the first aspect, Jesus is the
martyrion,—the testimony in his life and in his death, to
righteousness, to the power and goodness of God. In the second aspect he
is the antilytron or ransom. But, in either aspect, Jesus Christ's
solemn and dolorous condemnation of sin does actually loosen sin's hold
and attraction upon us who regard it,—makes it easier for us to
understand and love goodness, to rise above self, to die to sin.
Christ's sacrifice, however, and the condemnation of sin it contained,
was made for us while we were yet sinners; it was made irrespectively of
our power or inclination to sympathise with it and appreciate it. Yet,
even thus, in Paul's view, the sacrifice reconciled us to God, to the
eternal order; for it contained the means, the only possible means, of
our being brought into harmony with this order. Jesus Christ,
nevertheless, was delivered for our sins while we were yet sinners,[94]
and before we could yet appreciate what he did. But presently there
comes a change. Grace, the goodness of God, the spirit,—as Paul loved
to call that awful and beneficent impulsion of things within us and
without us, which we can concur with, indeed, but cannot create,—leads
us to repentance towards God,[95] a change of the inner man in regard
to the moral order, duty, righteousness. And now, to help our impulse
towards righteousness, we have a power enabling us to turn this impulse
to full account. Now the spirit does its greatest work in us; now, for
the first time, the influence of Jesus Christ's pregnant act really
gains us. For now awakens the sympathy for the act and the appreciation
of it, which its doer dispensed with or was too benign to wait for;
faith working through love towards Christ[96] enters into us, masters
us. We identify ourselves,—this is the line of Paul's thought,—with
Christ; we repeat, through the power of this identification, Christ's
death to the law of the flesh and self-pleasing, his condemnation of sin
in the flesh; the death how imperfectly, the condemnation how
remorsefully! But we rise with him, Paul continues, to life, the only
true life, of imitation of God, of putting on the new man which after
God is created in righteousness and true holiness,[97] of following the
eternal law of the moral order which by ourselves we could not follow.
Then God justifies us. We have the righteousness of God and the sense of
having it; we are freed from the oppressing sense of eternal order
guiltily outraged and sternly retributive; we act in joyful conformity
with God's will, instead of in miserable rebellion to it; we are in
harmony with the universal order, and feel that we are in harmony with
it. If, then, Christ was delivered for our sins, he was raised for our
justification. If by Christ's death, says Paul, we were reconciled to
God, by the means being thus provided for our else impossible access to
God, much more, when we have availed ourselves of these means and died
with him, are we saved by his life which we partake.[98] Henceforward
we are not only justified but sanctified; not only in harmony with the
eternal order and at peace with God, but consecrated[99] and
unalterably devoted to them; and from this devotion comes an
ever-growing union with God in Christ, an advance, as St. Paul says,
from glory to glory.[100]
This is Paul's conception of Christ's sacrifice. His figures of ransom,
redemption, propitiation, blood, offering, all subordinate themselves to
his central idea of identification with Christ through dying with him,
and are strictly subservient to it. The figured speech of Paul has its
own beauty and propriety. His language is, much of it, eastern language,
imaginative language; there is no need for turning it, as Puritanism has
done, into the methodical language of the schools. But if it is to be
turned into methodical language, then it is the language into which we
have translated it that translates it truly.
We have before seen how it fares with one of the two great tenets which
Puritanism has extracted from St. Paul, the tenet of predestination. We
now see how it fares with the other, the tenet of justification. Paul's
figures our Puritans have taken literally, while for his central idea
they have substituted another which is not his. And his central idea
they have turned into a figure, and have let it almost disappear out of
their mind. His essential idea lost, his figures misused, an idea
essentially not his substituted for his,—the unedifying patchwork thus
made, Puritanism has stamped with Paul's name, and called the gospel.
It thunders at Romanism for not preaching it, it casts off Anglicanism
for not setting it forth alone and unreservedly, it founds organisations
of its own to give full effect to it; these organisations guide
politics, govern statesmen, destroy institutions;—and they are based
upon a blunder!
It is to Protestantism, and this its Puritan gospel, that the reproaches
thrown on St. Paul, for sophisticating religion of the heart into
theories of the head about election and justification, rightly attach.
St. Paul himself, as we have seen, begins with seeking righteousness and
ends with finding it; from first to last, the practical religious sense
never deserts him. If he could have seen and heard our preachers of
predestination and justification, they are just the people he would have
called 'diseased about questions and word-battlings.'[101] He would have
told Puritanism that every Sunday, when in all its countless chapels it
reads him and preaches from him, the veil is upon its heart. The moment
it reads him right, a veil will seem to be taken away from its
heart;[102] it will feel as though scales were fallen from its eyes.
And now, leaving Puritanism and its errors, let us turn again for a
moment, before we end, to the glorious apostle who has occupied us so
long. He died, and men's familiar fancies of bargain and appeasement,
from which, by a prodigy of religious insight, Paul had been able to
disengage the death of Jesus, fastened on it and made it their own. Back
rolled over the human soul the mist which the fires of Paul's spiritual
genius had dispersed for a few short years. The mind of the whole world
was imbrued in the idea of blood, and only through the false idea of
sacrifice did men reach Paul's true one. Paul's idea of dying with
Christ the Imitation elevates more conspicuously than any Protestant
treatise elevates it; but it elevates it environed and dominated by the
idea of appeasement;—of the magnified and non-natural man in Heaven,
wrath-filled and blood-exacting; of the human victim adding his piacular
sufferings to those of the divine. Meanwhile another danger was
preparing. Gifted men had brought to the study of St. Paul the habits of
the Greek and Roman schools, and philosophised where Paul Orientalised.
Augustine, a great genius, who can doubt it?—nay, a great religious
genius, but unlike Paul in this, and inferior to him, that he confused
the boundaries of metaphysics and religion, which Paul never
did,—Augustine set the example of finding in Paul's eastern speech,
just as it stood, the formal propositions of western dialectics. Last
came the interpreter in whose slowly relaxing grasp we still lie,—the
heavy-handed Protestant Philistine. Sincere, gross of perception,
prosaic, he saw in Paul's mystical idea of man's investiture with the
righteousness of God nothing but a strict legal transaction, and
reserved all his imagination for Hell and the New Jerusalem and his
foretaste of them. A so-called Pauline doctrine was in all men's mouths,
but the ideas of the true Paul lay lost and buried.
Every one who has been at Rome has been taken to see the Church of St.
Paul, rebuilt after a destruction by fire forty years ago. The church
stands a mile or two out of the city, on the way to Ostia and the
desert. The interior has all the costly magnificence of Italian
churches; oh the ceiling is written in gilded letters: 'Doctor
Gentium.' Gold glitters and marbles gleam, but man and his movement are
not there. The traveller has left at a distance the fumum et opes
strepitumque Romæ; around him reigns solitude. There is Paul, with the
mystery which was hidden from ages and from generations, which was
uncovered by him for some half score years, and which then was buried
with him in his grave! Not in our day will he relive, with his incessant
effort to find a moral side for miracle, with his incessant effort to
make the intellect follow and secure all the workings of the religious
perception. Of those who care for religion, the multitude of us want the
materialism of the Apocalypse; the few want a vague religiosity.
Science, which more and more teaches us to find in the unapparent the
real, will gradually serve to conquer the materialism of popular
religion. The friends of vague religiosity, on the other hand, will be
more and more taught by experience that a theology, a scientific
appreciation of the facts of religion, is wanted for religion; but a
theology which is a true theology, not a false. Both these influences
will work for Paul's re-emergence. The doctrine of Paul will arise out
of the tomb where for centuries it has lain buried. It will edify the
church of the future; it will have the consent of happier generations,
the applause of less superstitious ages. All will be too little to pay
half the debt which the church of God owes to this 'least of the
apostles, who was not fit to be called an apostle, because he persecuted
the church of God.'[103]
