← catalogue

St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans: A Practical Exposition. Vol. I

by Charles Gore · English · Gutenberg #32673 · 422,326 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans: A Practical Exposition. Vol. I
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans: A Practical Exposition. Vol. I

Author: Charles Gore


        
Release date: June 3, 2010 [eBook #32673]
                Most recently updated: January 6, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/32673

Credits: Produced by Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ST. PAUL'S EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS: A PRACTICAL EXPOSITION. VOL. I ***




Produced by Al Haines









_St. Paul's_

_Epistle to the Romans_


_A Practical Exposition_



BY THE

RIGHT REV. CHARLES GORE, D.D.

LORD BISHOP OF WORCESTER



VOL. I

(CHAPTERS I-VIII)



LONDON

JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.

1902




  FIRST EDITION .  _February_, 1899.
  _Reprinted . . . . . March_, 1900.
  _Reprinted . . . September_, 1900.
  _Reprinted . . . . October_, 1902.



OXFORD

HORACE HART, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY




{v}

PREFACE

A good excuse is needed for adding to the large number of excellent
commentaries on the Epistle to the Romans which already exist.  But I
think there is such an excuse.  These commentaries are not of the sort
which readers who are educated but not scholarly find it easy to
master; so that in fact this epistle is at the present day very much
misunderstood or ignored by such people.  And again, partly owing to
its interpretation at the period of the Reformation and by some
Evangelicals of later date, it is still practically to a great extent
viewed with discomfort and neglected by those who most value the name
of Catholic.  My excuse, then, for adding to the expositions of the
Romans lies in these facts.  One who is necessarily immersed in the
practical work of the Christian ministry, and is yet struggling to keep
himself in some sense in line with biblical scholarship, if his life
involves special disadvantages, may yet hope to be useful in
interpreting to ordinary Christians {vi} the results of the scholars.
And I am persuaded that it requires one who enters thoroughly into the
spirit of churchmanship, or the obligation of the one body, to
interpret with any completeness the mind of St. Paul.

This volume has practically no more connexion with lectures delivered
in Westminster Abbey last Lent, than is implied in its being an
exposition of the same epistle by the same person.

The method of exposition in this volume is the same as that pursued in
its predecessor on the Epistle to the Ephesians.  After a general
introduction, each section of the Revised Version is taken, or in some
cases two sections are taken together, and prefaced by an analysis or
paraphrase, as seems most useful, and followed by further explanation
of the main ideas or phrases which each section contains.

The 'appended notes' I have been obliged to defer to the end of the
second volume--which, I hope, will appear within a year--with a view of
approximately equalizing the size of the two volumes.

CHARLES GORE.

WESTMINSTER ABBEY,
  _Conversion of St. Paul_, 1899.




{vii}

TABLE OF CONTENTS

                                                                  PAGE
INTRODUCTION.

     (i) Origin and circumstances of the epistle . . . . . . . .     1
    (ii) 'Justification by works' or 'by faith'  . . . . . . . .     6
   (iii) Justification, sanctification, and Church membership  .    25
    (iv) St. Paul's doctrine and modern spiritual needs  . . . .    41


THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS.

CHAPTER

    I.   1-7  SALUTATION  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   46
        8-17  INTRODUCTION  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   53


DIVISION I  _Universality of sin and condemnation_ . . . . . . .    63

       18-32 § 1 Judgement on the Gentile world  . . . . . . . .    66
   II.       § 2 Judgement on the Jews . . . . . . . . . . . . .    87
  III.   1-8 § 3 Jewish objections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   114
        9-20 § 4 Sin and condemnation universal  . . . . . . . .   121


DIVISION II  _Justification by faith only_.

       21-31 § 1 Christ our propitiation . . . . . . . . . . . .   130
   IV.       § 2 The true seed of Abraham  . . . . . . . . . . .   155


{viii}

DIVISION III  _The accepted life or the moral consequences
              of justification_.

    V.  1-11 §  1 The holy confidence of the justified . . . . .   175
       12-21 §  2 The second Adam  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   185

   VI.  1-14 §  3 The Christian life a living by dying . . . . .   204
       15-23 §  4 The perfect freedom in God's service . . . . .   225

  VII.   1-6 §  5 Freedom from the law by union with Christ  . .   236
        7-25 §  6 The function and failure of the law  . . . . .   245

 VIII.  1-11 §  7 Life in the Spirit . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   271
       12-17 §  8 The life of sonship  . . . . . . . . . . . . .   288
       18-30 §  9 The hope of the creation . . . . . . . . . . .   298
       31-39 § 10 Christian assurance  . . . . . . . . . . . . .   321




{1}

THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS


_Introduction._

i.

St. Paul's great Epistle to the Romans was written, as may be quite
confidently asserted, from Corinth, during the second visit to Greece
recorded in the Acts[1], i.e. in the beginning of the year commonly
reckoned 58, but perhaps more correctly 56 A.D.--the year following the
writing of the Epistles to the Corinthians.  The reasons for this
confident statement, and indeed for all that needs to be said about the
circumstances under which St. Paul wrote and the conditions of
Christianity at Rome, become apparent chiefly in connexion with the
later parts of the epistle which are not included in this volume.  They
{2} shall therefore be omitted here, and we will content ourselves for
the moment with a very brief statement of the results in which scholars
are now finding, as it would seem, final agreement.

The existence of Christians at Rome was due not to any apostolic
founding, for no apostle appears yet to have visited Rome, but to the
sort of 'quiet and fortuitous filtration[2]' of Christians from various
parts of the empire to its great centre which must naturally have taken
place; for from all quarters there was a tendency to Rome.  'Some from
Palestine, some from Corinth, some from Ephesus and other parts of
Proconsular Asia, possibly some from Tarsus, and more from the Syrian
Antioch, there was in the first instance, as we may believe, nothing
concerted in their going; but when once they arrived in the metropolis,
the freemasonry common among Christians would soon make them known to
each other, and they would form, not exactly an organized Church'--that
may well have been the result of the later presence of St. Paul and St.
Peter--'but such a fortuitous assemblage of Christians as was {3} only
waiting for the advent of an apostle to constitute one[3].'  Among this
assemblage of Christians it appears evident from St. Paul's language[4]
that there must have been Jews as well as Gentiles; but the dominant
character of the church was Gentile[5].  It is perhaps only putting
this in another way to say that there would have been among the Roman
Christians elements of hostility to St. Paul and his teaching, but
Christianity as St. Paul taught it would have been in the ascendant.
And probably St. Paul's special informants about affairs there would
have been his special friends, Prisca and Aquila[6].

The character of the epistle written to these Christians of the capital
is marked.  It has beyond any other of St. Paul's epistles the
character of an ordered theological treatise.  Of course it assumes the
existence of accepted Christian principles--the rudimentary instruction
or Christian 'tradition'--in the minds of those to whom it was
addressed[7].  But it takes certain of these principles of the
Christian {4} religion and develops them systematically and
argumentatively; though again, it must be explained, the argument is
very far from being barely logical, but is full of the deepest feeling,
showing itself in passages of memorable eloquence which live in the
hearts of all of us.

Why this particular epistle should have this character of a systematic
treatise is not hard to see.  St. Paul was reaching the end of his
great controversy for the catholicity of the Gospel, against the
Judaizers--that is, for the equal position of Gentiles and Jews in the
Church, and against the obligation upon the Gentiles of circumcision
and the ceremonial law.  That controversy was the occasion of the
apostolic conference at Jerusalem, which is described both by St. Luke
in the Acts[8] and, from the point of view of St. Paul's own 'apology,'
in the Epistle to the Galatians[9].  It is felt at its whitest heat in
that intensely concentrated and passionate epistle.  But by the time
that the Epistle to the Romans came to be written the controversy was
quieting down.  The victory of Catholicism over Judaism was as good as
won.  The great principle of justification by faith, not by works of
the law, had developed itself lucidly {5} and clearly in St. Paul's
mind, and flowed out in our epistle in an ordered sequence of thought,
rich, profound, and mature.

And there were special reasons why it should have been expressed in
writing at this moment, and to the Roman Christians.  Though the heat
of the conflict inside the Church was over, the fierce hostility of
many of the Jews, both within and without the Church, to St. Paul
personally was by no means past.  Now St. Paul was on his way up to
Jerusalem with the money collected in the Gentile churches for the poor
brethren there.  He attached great importance to this expression of
Gentile goodwill, and almost more importance to its acceptance at his
hands by the Jerusalem Christians[10].  It was to be a link of mutual,
practical love to bind the divergent elements in the Church together.
But he felt, and as experience showed rightly, that his enterprise
would be attended with great peril to his life.  This epistle
therefore, like his speech at Miletus, has something of the character
of 'last words[11].'  He is in writing it committing to the future the
fruits of his labours, so far as they can be expressed in a doctrine,
at a moment when he feels that their continuance is being {6} seriously
imperilled.  And this summary of his life's teaching in its most
characteristic aspect is most fitly addressed to the Christians of the
great city which was the centre of the then world.  St. Paul already
conceived of Christianity as, in prospect at least, the religion of the
empire.  It was vastly important, therefore, that the capital should
know it and hold it in its full glory and richness.  He himself, if he
escaped safe through the visit to Jerusalem, was bent on immediately
going thither and securing this great end by his personal ministry[12].
But he could not depend on the future.  He must seize the golden
moment--buying up the opportunity at least by a letter.

This, in very brief words, is an account of the circumstances and
conditions under which the Epistle to the Romans was written, and it
must suffice for the moment till some of the details are presented to
us in its later chapters.


ii.

There are men of whom it is especially true that their teaching is the
outcome of their own {7} personal experience.  If a man's teaching is
to have any real force this must be in a measure true in any case.  But
in some men the personal experience has set an exceptionally strong
impress upon the intellectual convictions, and so upon the teaching.
Such men--otherwise very different from one another--are Augustine,
Dante, Luther, Bunyan, Newman.  Such an one was St. Paul.  His
intellectual theory is on fire with the emotions bred of a personal
experience, both bitter and sweet, but always intense.  And if there is
professedly more of autobiography in the Epistle to the Galatians, yet
in fact we know St. Paul's interior life, both before and after his
'conversion,' so far as we know it at all, mainly through the
generalized account of it in the Epistle to the Romans.  For the
doctrine of justification by faith, not by works of the law, developed
in this epistle, is the record of his personal experience reduced to a
general principle.  St. Paul had, on the lines of his Pharisaic
education, in the first half of his life zealously sought to be
justified by works, and had found out his mistake.

What is the real meaning of this phrase?  Ordinarily we Englishmen find
it natural to appropriate St. James' 'common sense' language {8} about
justification rather than St. Paul's[13], and say that faith is surely
of no moral value without works or good actions, and that we can be
justified by nothing else except our conduct.  Or if the Pharisees are
pointed to with their rigid ecclesiastical observances as types of men
seeking to be justified before God by the merits of their works, then,
in this sense of works, we feel that the idea of justification by such
means, apart from deeper moral effort, is one which has passed out of
our horizon.  Yet if we get to the moral essence of the Pharisaic idea,
we may still find it lying very close at hand to us, even though we do
not know what a phylactery means, and are at a safe distance from
fasting twice in the week, or giving tithes of all that we acquire.  A
well-to-do Englishman, of whatever class, has a strong sense of
respectability.  He has a code of duty and honour which he is at pains
to observe.  A soldier, a gentleman, a woman of fashion, a peasant's
wife, a schoolboy, and an undergraduate, representing not more than the
average moral levels of their different classes, will all of them make
really great sacrifices to fulfil the requirements of their respective
codes.  Their conscience requires {9} this of them, and they would be
miserable in falling short of it.  But their conscience is also limited
to it.  They resent the claim of a progressive morality.  Conscientious
within the region of the traditional and the expected, they are often
almost impenetrable to light from beyond.  They are nervously afraid of
the very idea of subjecting their life to a fundamental revision in the
light of Christ's claim, or to the idea of surrender to the divine
light wherever it may lead.  But this frame of mind--conscientiousness
within a limited and well-established area accepted by public opinion,
coupled with resentment at whatever completer and diviner claim may
interfere to disconcert one's self-satisfaction, and bid one begin
afresh on a truer basis--is that very attempt to be justified by works
which appeared in the case of the Pharisees, only dressed in very
different guise to that in which the conditions of modern England
clothe it.

For the Pharisees of the Gospels were the later representatives of the
Hasidaeans, i.e. Chasidim or 'pious' folk, whom we hear of in the Books
of Maccabees[14].  The later religious development of Israel lay along
the lines of {10} rigid reverence for the law.  In days then of general
laxity and a general prevalence of Greek customs, these pious
Israelites united themselves to promote the devout observance of their
law.  Their relation to Maccabaean heroes and rulers varied, as
religious or political motives were uppermost in the Maccabaean house.
They themselves pursued one consistent aim.  They came to be known as
the Pharisees, the separated or the separatists, the party who kept
aloof from everything common or unclean.  As such they represented the
religious nation in its later development.  They had the bulk of the
people, and especially the women, with them.  They had consequently, as
Josephus tells us, an irresistible influence upon public affairs, and
especially upon religious affairs, and they held the social position
befitting the legitimate religious leaders of God's own people.

This position, with its accompanying reputation, they doubtless
deserved by their zeal for the law, and for the 'traditions of the
fathers' which hedged about or interpreted the law.  But according to
the solemn witness of Christ and St. Paul, a disastrous lowering of the
best moral standard of the Old Testament scriptures had taken place
among them.  The Mosaic law was, {11} of course, a matter mainly of
outward observance, and therefore would become a matter of rigid social
requirement within the area of such a body as the Pharisees.  Nowhere
does public opinion act more strongly than in a close religious circle.
But the social requirement according to tradition came to be
substituted for that deeper spiritual relation of the 'holy nation' and
the individuals composing it to God and His will, which is the real
moral essence of the Old Testament.  'How can ye believe,' our Lord
said to them, 'which receive glory one of another, and the glory that
cometh from the only God ye seek not[15]?'  This is the central moral
weakness of the Pharisaic position.  A social or ecclesiastical
tradition had taken the place of the will of God.  This social
tradition was rigid and stern in respect of the 'tradition of the
elders,' but it did not revise itself constantly or at all in the light
of the mind of God, and therefore its moral standard became debased.
It 'made void the word of God because of the tradition.'  It 'tithed
mint and anise and cummin, and left undone the weightier matters of the
law, judgement, and mercy, and faith.'  It 'strained out the gnat, and
swallowed the camel[16].'  It {12} came to be almost purely external
and consistent with even the grossest spiritual hypocrisy, as both St.
Paul and our Lord Himself assure us.  Above all, it was completely
satisfied with itself.  'We have Abraham to our Father.'  'I thank thee
that I am not as other men are.'  That is the characteristic tone of
Pharisees and of all who, however unlike them otherwise, are living by
a strong social standard and priding themselves on belonging to a
respectable and dignified class.  This it is that St. Paul calls
seeking to be justified or commended to God by 'works' or 'works of the
law'--not, we must observe, 'good works,' such as are the fruit of a
right disposition towards God, of which St. Paul never spoke with any
disparagement.

It is the characteristic of the Pharisaic attitude that a man holds by
a strict code enforced by the public opinion of his church or circle; a
code which he diligently and even painfully obeys.  But it is
characteristic of this attitude also that it resents new light, and
tacitly claims independence even of God, provided that 'the law' is
kept or the accepted standard maintained.  Thus the Pharisees resented
the Christ, when renewing the voice of the old prophets, without
respect of persons, He exposed the {13} moral weaknesses of these
religious leaders, and bade them, in effect, begin again and think
afresh what God's will really meant: when He warned them that the one
unpardonable sin is to be self-satisfied in one's own eyes, and to
repudiate as an impertinent intruder the fresh divine light.  The story
is very familiar.  They resented and rejected the Christ because He
made the unlimited divine claim upon them: because He spoke to them as
God to the human soul, and not as the representative of 'the
tradition.'  'Seeking to establish their own righteousness, they did
not subject themselves to the righteousness of God[17].'

Now we understand what it is to seek to be justified by works.  It is
to have a social or ecclesiastical code, and to claim acceptance in
God's sight because we perform it, meanwhile making 'the law' under
which we act, believed to be divine, a substitute for the living and
personal God, and resenting any fresh and immediate claim of God on the
human soul.

In this mixture of subservience and independence, of religious humility
and human pride, Saul of Tarsus had been brought up 'at the feet of
Gamaliel in Jerusalem.'  His was not {14} one of those slack
consciences which enable men to take the lowest line which respectable
public opinion will allow.  In every ecclesiastical system the strict
law comes to be mitigated by various dispensations and
compensations--generally substitutions of the easier ceremonial for the
harder moral requirement.  But young Saul no doubt took the law in its
fullest sense as the thing to be kept, with all its accompanying
traditions.  So taken, it constituted no doubt what St. Peter calls
it[18]--an intolerable yoke.  A strict Jew must have had a very
difficult life of it.  But it was not this yoke of specific outward
requirements that staggered St. Paul.  What he found crushing was the
inward claim--'Thou shall not covet[19].'  He who had determined to
appear before God at the last with a clear record as one who had kept
the law, found himself confronted by an inner and searching claim of
the divine righteousness, to which no blamelessness in outward conduct
enabled him to correspond.  He could not help feeling himself a sinner
in the eye of God; and the sacrificial system plainly gave his
conscience no relief at all.  He does not even allude to it in this
connexion.  Meanwhile, as he moved {15} about in Jewish society of the
empire at Tarsus and elsewhere, he found that it required no spiritual
microscope to discover that the law in many of its plainest moral
injunctions was in fact not being observed at all.  He seemed to see
that instead of the law being really the means of justification, it in
effect put 'the righteous nation' simply in the position of condemned
sinners, and himself among them, as fully as if they were simply
without a divinely given law, like the 'sinners of the Gentiles.'

We know well how, when the way of God had been learnt more perfectly,
this earlier moral experience of the effect of the law on himself and
others worked itself out in St. Paul's mind into a deep theory of the
function, not of 'the law' only, that is the Mosaic law, but of law
altogether--of 'the letter' of any body of external enactments.  Law,
he found, could enlighten the conscience, but it could never reach deep
enough to the springs of will to strengthen and purify them.  God must
become more intimate to man than any external law can make Him.  A law
of ordinances can only be a preparatory discipline, intended by the
very falsity of the assumption on which it is based to teach men that
they are not what they fancied themselves.  {16} They fancied
themselves beings sufficiently independent to stand on their own basis
and enter into a covenant with God, to make a compact with Him to
observe a law and to abide by the result.  It is the function of such a
compact as between independent parties to convince men that any such
relation between God, the Creator and Giver, and man, the creature and
simply the receiver--still more between God the Holy and man the
defiled and weakened--is simply contrary to fundamental facts[20].

As yet, however, St. Paul was only rendered miserable by his experience
under the law.  To feel himself a sinner alienated from God was a
profound humiliation to his spiritual pride.  He was fired no doubt by
the lofty ideal of the righteous nation, standing before God in virtue
of its righteousness, of its performance of the divine law, and
therefore making its claim on God to vindicate it before the whole
world.  He threw himself zealously into rigid observance: only,
however, to find himself humiliated and perplexed.

Meanwhile, he was becoming conscious of the {17} claim of Jesus of
Nazareth to be the Christ.  Under what conditions that claim began to
confront him we do not in the least know.  But he must have known in
the period before his conversion that the severest attack on the
spiritual position of the Pharisees ever delivered had been delivered
by Him who claimed to be the Christ; that the Pharisees in consequence
had thrown all their influence into the rejection of His claim, and if
they had not been the most direct instruments of His death, yet had
encouraged and sanctioned it.  Thus the more dissatisfied he became in
his own conscience, the more zealous he grew for the Pharisaic
position, and the more fanatical, therefore, against the followers of
the crucified Jesus.  At what point it began to dawn upon his
conscience that perhaps Jesus was right and not the Pharisees; that
perhaps it was in His teaching that his own restless heart was to find
repose, we can only wonder.  Some struggle such as this dawning
consciousness would involve he certainly passed through.  'It was hard
for him to kick against the goad[21].'  At last, and at a definite
moment, God 'triumphed over him' in Christ, and he gave in his {18}
allegiance to Jesus as the Christ on the road to Damascus.  Many a man
has thus after a struggle surrendered to God at discretion: many a man
has shown the will, as Faber calls it,

          'to lose my will in His,
  And by that loss be free.'


But to no man can it ever have involved a completer sacrifice of his
own pride and prejudice--of his own personal comfort and safety--than
it did to St. Paul: and, therefore, in no man did it ever involve a
vaster increase of spiritual illumination.  Hitherto he had stood on
the basis which his pride in his religious position gave him and,
starting thence, had sought to erect the spiritual fabric of a life
acceptable to God.  But the more he had known of God and the more he
had struggled, the less satisfied he had become.  God seemed to be in
no other attitude towards him than that of a dissatisfied taskmaster.
Now he had surrendered at discretion into God's hands.  He had no
position of his own to maintain.  He had put himself in God's hands.
In His sight he was content to be treated as a sinner, just like one of
the Gentiles--to be forgiven of His pure and unmerited love, and of His
pure and unmerited love endued with a spiritual power for which {19} he
could take no credit to himself, for it was simply a gift.  Once more,
he had henceforth no prejudices and recognized no limitation on what he
might be required to bear or do.  His life was handed over to be
controlled from above.  Thus when St. Paul sets justification by faith
and faith only in opposition to justification by works of the law, he
is contrasting two different attitudes towards God and duty, which in
the two halves of his own sharply sundered life he had himself
conspicuously represented.  The contrast may be expressed perhaps in
four ways.

1.  The man under the law of works is mainly concerned about external
conduct and observances--the making clean of the outside of the cup and
the platter: the man of faith is concerned almost altogether with the
relation of his heart to God at the springs of action.  Faith is a
disposition of the heart which indeed results in a certain kind of
outward conduct, but which has its value already, prior to the outward
conduct, because of what it inwardly is.  Faith, as Calvin said,
pregnant with good works, justifies before they are brought forth.
This distinction between faith and works underlies St. Paul's teaching
in parts, but is never very prominent.  {20} It accounts, however, for
St. Paul's shrinking from any insistence upon outward observances in
the Church, such as do not necessarily convey any spiritual meaning or
power.  'Why,' he cries to the Colossians, 'do ye subject yourselves to
ordinances; handle not, nor taste, nor touch (all which things are to
perish with the using), after the precepts and doctrines of men?[22]'

2.  Inasmuch as 'the law' was a national thing, so 'works of the law'
were a supposed means of justification confined to Israel, and an
occasion of contempt for other nations.  Faith, on the other hand, the
mere capacity to feel our own wants and to take God at His word, is a
universal quality and belongs, or may belong, to all men.  Thus
justification by faith is opposed to justification by works of the law,
as the universal or catholic to the merely Jewish or national, and in
this aspect the contrast occupies a great place in St. Paul's thought
and teaching.

3.  But it is not in the things it is occupied about, or in the range
of its activity, that faith is most centrally contrasted with works.
It is in the attitude of man towards God which it represents.  The
'worker' for justification always {21} retains his own independence
towards God.  He works upon the basis of a definite covenant by which
God is bound as well as himself.  He has the right to resent additional
claims.  Faith, on the other hand, means an entire abandonment of
independence.  It is self-committal, self-surrender.  'I know him whom
I have believed, and I am persuaded that he is able to guard that which
I have committed unto him against that day[23].'  The man of faith
throws all the responsibility for life on God, and says simply and
continually, 'Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth.'

It is of the utmost importance to notice that this is the only attitude
of man towards God which corresponds with the ultimate facts of human
nature, as science and philosophy are bound to represent them.  Man is,
in fact, an absolutely dependent being, physically and spiritually.
His virtue must lie, not in originativeness, but in correspondence.
Supposing him a free agent in God's universe, his freedom can only
consist in a power to correspond with divine forces and laws
intelligently and voluntarily; or on the other hand to disturb the
divine order of creation in a measure by {22} wilfulness and sin.  Now
faith is simply the faculty of loving correspondence with God.
'Justification by faith' is the only conception of justification which
is possible in the light of the root facts of human nature.  But of
course the practical appeal of this conclusion to the heart and will is
immensely increased, if men can be shown to have acted as if they were
independent and to have found it a failure; if life lived in
independence of God, with God as it were withdrawn from the actual
scene of life to its far-off horizon, is found to have resulted in
havoc, weakness and despair.  So, in fact, St. Paul's doctrine of the
true means of justification is based on an appeal, not so much to the
ultimate constitution of our human nature as to the experienced results
of our independence of God, to the facts of sin, whether among Gentiles
or Jews.

4.  Finally, the principle of justification by faith is contrasted with
that of justification by works of the law in the view which it involves
of the character of God.  The law, as St. Paul interprets it, views God
as a lord and taskmaster.  Faith presents Him as the Father of our
spirits, always waiting upon us with His eternal, unchangeable love;
bearing with us; {23} dealing with us even on a false basis which by
our sins we have forced upon Him, in order to bring us to a recognition
of the true; anyway acting or withholding action, if by any means we
can be won to recognize His true character and our true life.

These are the broad contrasts between the alternative methods of
justification by faith or by 'works of the law.'  The law, and the
attitude towards God which the law suggested, are, in St. Paul's view,
the main characteristic of the Old Testament.  This is a point of view
which we should expect in one trained by the Pharisees.  We may
possibly feel that St. Paul tends to identify with the Old Testament as
a whole one particular element in it which specially characterized one
particular period.  But at least the element was there, and occupied
there a highly important place in the whole development; and if St.
Paul in his idealizing manner sometimes speaks as if it was the whole
of the older covenant, as if he had forgotten all the teaching of
prophet and psalmist, yet he is not really forgetful.  Law is to him
the characteristic of the old covenant.  But behind the law God's
dealings with Abraham are for ever in his imagination witnessing
against the law's {24} limitation, and a similar witness is kept up all
along: so that St. Paul can take out of one of the books of Moses his
very central statement of the principle of faith[24].

In what has just been said justifying faith has been treated as if it
were simply, as it is really, faith in God; whereas in St. Paul's
language the object of justifying faith is constantly 'Jesus[25].'  The
explanation of this is that in Jesus Christ God has manifested His
character as Father, and has come near to men, 'reconciling the world
unto Himself,' by the atonement wrought through His incarnate Son, and
giving conspicuous evidence of His saving power by raising Him from the
dead[26].  Thus, if Jesus is the proximate object of justifying faith,
it is Jesus as manifesting the Father, Jesus as God incarnate; and St.
Peter is strictly interpreting St. Paul when he represents the object
of Christ's sacrifice and resurrection in the phrase, 'that your faith
and hope might be in God[27].'  The faith of the Christian is the old
faith of Abraham and Habakkuk, the faith in the Lord {25} Jehovah only
now made manifest in a new and completer manner, in a more intimate
relation to human life, and with a more winning appeal to the human
heart.


iii.

Now that we have gained a general idea of what St. Paul meant by
justification by faith, as opposed to justification by works of law, we
are in a position to deal with a number of questions which have been
famous in ecclesiastical history.  Does justification mean being made
righteous, or being reckoned for righteous? if it means the latter, how
can God reckon us as being what in fact we are not?  Again, what is the
relation of this justification to sanctification? are these two stages,
of which the first is over before the second can begin?  Again, what is
the relation of justification to Church membership? is justification a
purely individual process or fact, of which membership in the Church
or, what comes to the same thing, reception of the sacraments, is a
merely secondary and strictly unessential consequence?

The answers to these questions are all connected with one another.
Justification, to begin with, is a judicial or, as it is called,
'forensic' {26} word.  It expresses the verdict of acquittal.  The use
of the word in the Bible made this quite indisputable[28].  Thus God
justifies whenever He refuses to condemn--when, whatever may have been
our sins, He ignores them, and therefore positively admits us into the
accepted people.  And He declares His willingness to do this simply
because a man believes in Jesus Christ.  Let a man believe, or take God
in Jesus Christ at His gracious word, and the value of this act of
trust or allegiance is such that God reckons it for righteousness, and
admits a man into the accepted people, as if he were already fit for
such fellowship in his actual habits or character.  There is
'imputation' here, but it is the right sort of imputation.  It is
dealing with us not as we are, nor exactly as we are not, but as we are
becoming in virtue of a new attachment under which our life has passed:
and this, as the engrossing modern conception of development makes it
easy for us to perceive, is the only true and profound way of regarding
anything.  Not the standard already reached, but the movement,
direction, or vitality is the important matter.  Faith, then, is
'reckoned for righteousness' because it puts us upon the right {27}
basis and in the right relation to God; and therefore is a root out of
which, provided it continues to subsist, all righteousness can
healthily grow; whereas the most brilliant efforts or 'works' on a
wrong basis may have neither sound root nor principle of progress in
them.  To believe in Jesus is to have the root of the matter in
oneself.  Therefore, when a man first believes, God can ignore all his
previous life, and deal with him simply on the new basis, in hope.  Of
course this preliminary acquittal or acceptance is provisional.  As the
servant[29] who had been forgiven his debts found them rolled back upon
him when he behaved in a manner utterly inconsistent with the position
of a forgiven man, so our preliminary justification may be promptly
cancelled by our future conduct if we behave as one who has 'forgotten
the cleansing from his old sins[30].'  The prodigal son, after he has
been welcomed home, may go back again to the 'far country.'  But it
remains the fact:--of such infinite value and fruitfulness is faith in
God, as He has shown Himself in Jesus, that when a man first
believes--aye, whenever, over and over again, he returns to believe--he
is in God's sight on a new basis, however dark be the {28} background
of his previous sins; and he can be dealt with simply on the new basis,
according to the movement of the Father's heart of love which his faith
has set free.

Now the justifying faith of the conscience-stricken sinner, whose case
St. Paul always has in the foreground of his imagination, means first
of all and most obviously that he consciously takes God at His word as
being ready to forgive his sins, and accept him for Jesus' sake in whom
he believes.  It is belief in God as forgiving, or in Jesus as--he does
not stop to inquire how--obtaining and giving him forgiveness.  And St.
Paul laid great stress on this simple acceptance of the gift of pardon,
as the gate of the new life and the first act of faith, because the
readiness to be treated as a sinner and merely forgiven in spite 'f our
sins is, as he knew full well in his own case, the final overthrow of
spiritual pride.  But this simple 'reliance on the merits of Christ,'
and acceptance of forgiveness at His hands and for His sake, is a
profound movement of the heart--of the spring of human actions--which
involves much more than appears.  Luther was hopelessly wrong and
unlike St. Paul when he isolated this mere reliance on another's
merits, and, setting it apart from all {29} deeper movement of will or
love, would have it, and it only, concerned with our justification.  To
St. Paul even the first movement of faith is a surrender of
independence, and a recognition in intellect, and much more in will, of
the lordship of Jesus.  It is, in other words, a change of allegiance,
and this is the important thing about it.  And the absolved man, in
thanking God for his forgiveness, finds himself, as it were, inevitably
and without any fresh act, embarked on a new service.  If he does not
find this, he is not a man of faith at all.  Faith is so deep a
principle that, though it shows itself first as the mere acceptance of
an undeserved boon from the divine bounty, it involves such hanging
upon God as necessarily enlists the will to choose and serve Him, the
intellect to know and worship Him with a growing perception as He is
revealed in Jesus, and the affections to desire and love Him.  The life
of justification thus proceeds 'from faith to faith'--from faith in
Christ 'for us' to faith in Christ 'in us.'  The justified man,
accepted into the 'body of Christ' by baptism and made a participator
of the life of Christ, receives the continual gifts of the divine
bounty in their appointed channels, and his faith exercising its
natural {30} faculty of correspondence, absorbs and appropriates the
divine gifts--intellectually, so that the eyes of the understanding are
opened in increasing knowledge--practically, so that 'Christ dwells in
the heart by faith,' and it is no longer the bare human self which
lives, but Christ which lives in the renewed man, with a continual
display of moral power.

The first justification or acceptance is therefore a preliminary step:
it is acceptance for admission into the divine household, or city of
God, or life in Christ.  It is a means to an end, and that end the
fellowship of Christ, and continually developing assimilation to Him.
Does this mean, then, that justification and sanctification are
processes following the one on the other, of which the former is over
before the latter begins?  Such a statement must be repudiated so far
as its latter clause is concerned.  You cannot thus logically sever a
vital process.  They are two parts of one vital process; and the man
who is not on the way to being made like Christ (however far off it he
may be at the moment) is by that very fact shown to be not in a state
of justification or acceptance with God.  At any stage of spiritual
life there must be movement in order to make forgiveness {31} possible.
Grant this however and it becomes true that justification, as meaning
acquittal, is a preliminary to sanctification, that is, the being made
like Christ.  The having our 'heart set at liberty' is a preliminary to
'running the way of God's commandments.'  But even so we must recognize
that St. Paul never exactly uses this language.  When he describes the
stages of God's dealings with the soul he passes from justification to
glorification, or (final) deliverance from sin and wrath[31].  Or, on
one occasion, he mentions sanctification before justification[32].

This is in part accounted for by the fact that the word translated
'sanctify' or 'sanctification' means rather 'consecrate' (as to
priesthood) or 'consecration.'  And though this consecration involves
'sanctity' (in our sense) because of the character of God to whom we
are dedicated, yet it may precede it; and we are in fact consecrated
and hallowed at the moment when we are accepted into the 'priestly
body' and anointed with the divine unction[33].  This exact meaning of
the term sanctification in part accounts for St. Paul not speaking of
sanctification and justification as successive stages of the spiritual
life.  When he {32} is speaking about justification he is answering the
question, What is the attitude of the human soul towards God which sets
God free, so to speak, to accept it and work upon it?  And the answer
is, The attitude of faith.  When he speaks of sanctification, or rather
consecration, he is answering the implied question, How is the
individual to be thought of when he has been admitted by baptism into
the Christian community?  And the answer is, He is to be thought of as
consecrated, or as sharing the life of a consecrated people[34].  St.
Paul's language in one place would suggest that if 'justification'
qualifies for admission into the life in Christ, the result of this
admission is again a justification, not now merely of our persons, but
of our whole moral being--a 'justification of life[35].'  But this is,
at least, not his usual use of the word.

And now we approach the question of the relation of our individual
justification to membership in the Church and all that goes with that.
To put the question in a rough controversial way--Is the Epistle to the
Romans, as it has been {33} frequently held to be, a thoroughly
Protestant work?

The Prophet Ezekiel first clearly discerned and expressed the truth
that the new covenant of God with man must be based upon the conversion
of individual wills and hearts.  So it was realized.  The basis of the
Church was a profound movement of individual faith and love and
allegiance, in the apostles and first disciples.  And that on which it
is based is that by which it must progress--the real assent and
correspondence of individual wills and hearts.  They that receive the
testimony must set to their seals that God is true.  Thus one cannot
possibly exaggerate the importance in Christianity of the individual
spiritual life, or of individual conversion and faith, if he does not
isolate it.  He cannot possibly exaggerate the stress laid in the
Epistle to the Romans on individual faith and its results, if he does
not forget its context.  But what is meant by this proviso?  This
simply.  St. Paul, in his doctrine of justification by faith, is
describing the basis of the new covenant of God with man which is, as
truly as the old, a covenant with a community, an Israel of God.  The
faith which justifies, therefore, means the faith which qualifies for
the community as truly {34} as it admits into the favour of God.  The
very evidence that God accepts the first movement of faith is that the
believing man is admitted by baptism into the body of Christ.  The idea
of a faith in Jesus which does not seek admission into 'the body,' or
disparages it even while it accepts it, does not even present itself to
St. Paul's mind.  A faith which is content to remain outside Christ is
no faith at all, and the act of being 'baptized into Christ' is an act
by which 'in one spirit we are baptized into one body.'  Again, the
conception impressed upon the institution of the Eucharist is that
Christ's atoning sacrifice is the basis of a new covenant with a
society which is to share His life[36].

Elsewhere St. Paul expresses this by saying that what Christ bought for
Himself was a Church, a new Israel[37].  What His sacrifice purchased
was a new _community_.  There is the less necessity to insist upon this
truth because it is now being very generally perceived.  The most
powerful influence in recent German Protestant theology is that of
Albrecht Ritschl, and through him the truth has come back, through
unexpected channels, that the object {35} of the sacrificial death of
Christ, and therefore of the divine justification, is not the
individual but the Church[38]; or, if we may venture to modify the
phrase, the object of divine justification is the individual only as
becoming and remaining (so far as His will is concerned) a member of
the Church.  In fact, 'justification' may be rendered, without any
false idea being attached to it, 'acceptance for membership in the
sacred people, the Israel of God.'  And where any one has become a
member of the Church without even the rudimentary faith which can
render him acceptable in God's sight, there the awakening of such faith
is the condition of profitable or 'saving' membership.

From this point of view it is not difficult to see the relation of our
epistle, broadly, to Protestantism and Catholicism.  Protestantism was
a reaction against one-sided ecclesiasticism.  The Church is the
household of God, the home of His people.  She guides and disciplines
their souls.  She feeds them with the bread of life.  But her
representatives may suffer her to lose the spiritual characteristics of
the new covenant {36} and fall back upon those of the old.  She may
come to be characterized by a mere authoritativeness.  The spirit of
'the law of ordinances' may come to prevail again.  The sacraments may
be treated as charms; or, in other words, all moral and spiritual
requirement may be summed up in mere obedience, or in doing this and
that.  So, in fact, it happened to a great extent in the popular
mediaeval system; and Protestantism was a reaction.  It was a reaction
based on truth, as Luther seemed to himself to re-discover it in the
epistles to the Romans and the Galatians.  But the reaction broke up
the communion of Christians.  It thus impaired the sense of the one
body, and very often resulted in obliterating the perception of any
obligation to the visible body of Christ at all.  It became
individualist, and disparaged the sacraments which are at once both the
outward means of union with Christ and the bonds of cohesion for His
body, the Church.  But as we now look back upon the matter, we can see
as clearly as it is possible to see anything, that both mediaeval
Catholicism and Lutheran Protestantism (or modern English
Protestantism) represent one-sided developments in which thoughtful men
cannot permanently acquiesce.  The preliminary justifying {37} faith of
the individual does but warrant his admission into the body of Christ,
the divine society, by baptism.  And once admitted into the body, and
instructed in her tradition, faith finds its function intellectually in
meditating upon and appropriating the full meaning of the mystery of
God, and spiritually in appropriating and digesting the powers of that
divine and human life into which baptism admits us, and in which the
sacramental feast and sacrifice continually makes us anew
participators.  The Church with its sacramental gifts, and the personal
faith of the converted heart, are no more to be set in antithesis than
food and digestion, or the 'virtue which went out of Christ' and the
faith in Him which made men whole.  The sacraments certainly do not
save us without conversion and faith, and faith which leaves us
voluntarily isolated from the visible communion of the one body is not
what St. Paul meant by 'justifying faith.'

'Ah, yet consider it again!' is what we are continually tempted to
exclaim to some of our modern controversialists who appear to be still
repeating the watchwords of the sixteenth century.  For in fact the
famous controversial positions of the period of the Reformation were
{38} intensely one-sided, and have been antiquated by completer and
maturer study--not least in the matter of justification.

Thus Calvin's position on the subject was based upon and permeated by a
conception of God as predestinating and creating and internally
constraining some men to eternal life, and equally predestinating and
creating and abandoning other men, without possibility of recovery, to
eternal misery.  Such a conception is utterly abhorrent to modern
consciences: and we shall have occasion to observe with how little
reason any conception of God predestinating man to eternal misery has
been attributed to St. Paul[39].

Luther again, who identified himself, as no other teacher has ever
done, with St. Paul's epistles of justification, was so zealous to
separate the faith in virtue of which God justifies us from all idea of
merit, that he represented it as a bare acceptance of the divine offer
without any moral quality at all--a bare believing ourselves to be
saved, without any moral reason in it.  Thus, accepting an existing
scholastic distinction between an 'informed' faith, i.e. a faith
ensouled {39} by love, and a 'formless' or bare faith, he held the
faith on account of which God justifies us to be rigidly of the
formless kind; and while fully recognizing the richer sort of faith as
the God-given quality of those already justified, declared that it had
nothing to do with their justification.  But this conception of two
separate sorts of faith, of which only the loveless sort, that involves
no moral worth, has to do with our acceptance with God, is not only a
high road to moral laxity or antinomianism, but is also utterly alien
to the spirit of St. Paul, in whom the whole life of faith is one and
continuous[40].  It could only have arisen at a particular moment of
theological controversy which is past and gone.  And the same must be
said of the allied doctrine of the total depravity of our fallen
nature, which drove men to violent misinterpretations alike of
scripture and of their moral instincts.

And what of the Tridentine theology?  No doubt in its general view of
our fallen human nature it is far more reasonable and Pauline than the
Lutheran; and it is also truer to St. Paul in laying the main stress on
a divine righteousness {40} actually imparted to us, and not on
Christ's merits imputed and not imparted; or, in other words, in
recognizing that forgiveness is only a prelude to the development of a
new life of holiness.  But on the other hand it puts itself hopelessly
out of relation to St. Paul's language and thought by interpreting
justification as the being made righteous, and accordingly speaking of
baptism as the instrument by which we are justified, whereas to St.
Paul justification means our preliminary acceptance without regard to
what we have been, and the initial faith which enables men to be thus
accepted would normally, in those he is thinking about, have preceded
baptism, as in his own case, or that of Cornelius, or of the eunuch.
Who can doubt that the faith of St. Paul's conversion is what enabled
God to accept him, though it remained for him, as for other men, to
'wash away his sins' by being 'baptized into Christ[41]?'

May we not truly say that deeper and maturer study of St. Paul has for
us undercut and antiquated the theological standing-grounds of the {41}
sixteenth century, and substituted for them something both truer,
completer, and freer?


iv.

It only remains to make more emphatic what has been already suggested,
that the Pauline doctrine of justification is of much more than
antiquarian interest.  We do not, as has been already shown, get rid of
the 'danger of thinking to be saved by works' because we are not, like
the Pharisees, abandoned to ecclesiastical observances.  All moral
codes or standards, sanctioned by a society or class and involving no
more than a limited liability, come under the moral category of 'works
of a law.'  They all are apt to leave men as independent of God as the
Pharisees, and as resentful of the fuller light.  The late Master of
Balliol expresses a characteristic opinion that the notions of 'legal
righteousness,' or of 'the pride of human nature,' or 'the tendency to
rebel against the will of God, or to attach an undue value to good
works[42],' are 'fictions as applied to our own time[43].'  But {42}
this is surely lamentably untrue.  Men all round us dread the idea of
committing themselves to God.  They do not know how far it will carry
them.  They are like would-be soldiers who should refuse to enlist till
they had had some assurance as to the extremest risk that their service
might involve.  Thus, because they cannot get this assurance, they will
make no beginning of the life of real faith.  They live by a limited
code which retains their independence for them.  If they are also
ecclesiastically minded, the 'legal righteousness' always involved in
this sort of morality becomes even outwardly more like that of the
Pharisees, and it is not very uncommon among churchmen.  But the whole
habit of mind, inside or outside the area of professed churchmanship,
has its root in what is properly and profoundly human pride and the
false clinging to independence of God.  This 'pride of life' seems to
be almost more dangerous and, in fact, disastrous than even 'the lust
of the flesh and the lust of the eyes.'  Thus if we can only get St.
Paul's doctrine of the necessity of faith rightly understood, there is
no teaching more necessary for these times.

And, on the other hand, where men are really ready to follow the light
and do God's will, they {43} need--they need exceedingly for the good
of the whole body--to realize St. Paul's teaching about justification,
that is, about God's constant attitude towards men, in order to obtain
that peace which is meant to be, not the far-off goal of Christian
life, but its basis and foundation.  When a person is continuously
apprehensive and excited about his spiritual state, he is not in the
temper of mind in which he can best serve God or work out his own or
other men's salvation.  'Peace must go before as well as follow after;
a peace, too, not to be found in the necessity of law (as philosophy
has sometimes held), but in the sense of the love of God to His
creatures.  He has no right to this peace, and yet he has it.'  In
these words of the same writer whom we just now were obliged to
criticize we may find a simple expression of the truth.  'Wherefore,
being accepted of God simply because we take Him at His word, let us
have and hold peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ[44].'  Then
we can throw ourselves without embarrassments into the life of love and
sacrifice, the life which has the love of God in Christ for its motive,
and reflects it among men.

No doubt we must admit that St. Paul's {44} doctrine of justification
has not been generally appreciated in the Church--the fact is strange,
but it is indisputable.  No doubt also we must admit that those who
have chiefly been identified with it have often even disastrously
distorted it.  No doubt, as a result both of this neglect and of this
distortion, the ordinary religious Englishman of the present day is
disposed to pass it by as having little meaning for him.  Nevertheless
it remains true that no revival of religion can ever attain to any
ripeness or richness unless this central doctrine of St. Paul's gospel
resumes its central place with us also.  For, as St. Paul preached it,
it means this above all else--personal devotion to Jesus Christ as our
redeemer.  This personal devotion begins by accepting from Him the
unmerited boon of forgiveness of our sins, and (what is only the other
side of such forgiveness) inheritance in the consecrated body.  But the
consciousness of what we have received from Christ, and the price it
cost Him to put it at our disposal, gives to the whole subsequent life
the character of a devotion based on gratitude.  This is the Christian
life according to St. Paul--personal devotion to Christ and personal
service based on gratitude for what He has done for us.  'For the love
of Christ {45} constraineth us; because we thus judge, that one died
for all, therefore all died; and He died for all, that they which live
should no longer live unto themselves, but unto Him who for their sakes
died and rose again.'



[1] Acts xx. 23.

[2] Hort's _Prolegomena to Romans and Ephesians_ (Macmillan, 1895), p.
9.

[3] Sanday and Headlam's _Commentary_ (T. & T. Clark, 1895), p. xxviii.
This commentary is henceforth referred to as S. & H.

[4] See Rom. ii. 17; iii. 9, &c.

[5] See Rom. i. 13; xi. 13-32; xv. 14-21.

[6] Rom. xvi. 3.

[7] See Rom. vi. 17, and remarks p. 234; cf. S. & H., p. xli.

[8] Acts xv. 1-35.

[9] Gal. ii. 1-10.

[10] Rom. xv. 25-32.

[11] Hort, l.c., p. 44.

[12] Rom. i. 10, 11; xv. 22-24.

[13] On the relation between the two, see later, p. 168.

[14] 1 Macc. ii. 42; vii. 13 ff.

[15] John v. 44.

[16] Matt. xv. 6; xxiii. 23.

[17] Rom. x. 3.

[18] Acts xv. 10.

[19] Rom. vii. 7.

[20] See the argument of Gal. iii. 15-22.  'God is one' in a sense
which excludes the idea of any relatively independent contracting party
over against Him.

[21] Acts xxvi. 14.

[22] Col. ii. 20-22.

[23] 2 Tim. i. 12.

[24] Rom. x. 5-8.

[25] Cf. iii. 22, 26, &c.

[26] 2 Cor. v. 19; Rom. iv. 25.

[27] 1 Pet. i. 21.  It is of course the case that the name God in the
New Testament is _generally_ reserved for the Father, though the proper
divinity of Son and Spirit is constantly implied.

[28] See below, p. 124.

[29] Matt. xviii. 23-35.

[30] 2 Pet. i. 9.

[31] Rom. v. 9-11.

[32] 1 Cor. vi. 11.

[33] Cf. Hort, _First Ep. of Peter_ (Macmillan, 1898), p. 70.

[34] It is noticeable that St. Paul never uses the verb translated 'to
be sanctified' of persons in the present tense.  It always describes an
already existing state rather than a process.

[35] Rom. v. 18, but cf. later, p. 202.

[36] Hort, l.c., p. 24.

[37] Eph. v. 25; Tit. ii. 14; cf. Acts xx. 28.

[38] Ritschl, _Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung_, ii. p. 217 ff.  Cf. S. &
H., p. 122; and Orr, _Ritschlian Theology_ (Hodder and Stoughton, 1898)
p. 169 ff.

[39] The subject comes forward especially in connexion with chapters
ix-xi.

[40] I know that any brief statement about Luther's doctrine may be
disputed, for his own statements vary considerably.  But I think the
tendency of his teaching is fairly represented above.

[41] 'Acceptance' is already acquittal; but only in view of the new
life of the body of Christ which is to emancipate man from the power of
sin.  Thus it is only as incorporated into Christ that he finds his
former sin 'put away.'  'I believe in one baptism for the remission of
sins.'

[42] He should say, if he would represent St. Paul, 'works,' not 'good
works.'

[43] Essay on 'Righteousness by Faith,' in _Epistles of St. Paul_
(Murray, 1894), vol. ii. p. 264.  The whole essay is very
characteristic and very interesting, but not very Pauline.

[44] Rom. v. 1.




{46}

THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS


CHAPTER I. 1-7.

_Salutation._

It was the custom in the days of the Romans to begin a letter with a
brief indication from whom it came and to whom it was addressed, in the
form of a complimentary salutation, thus--to take an example from the
New Testament--'Claudius Lysias unto the most excellent governor Felix,
greeting[1].'  We are familiar in our day with the like forms for
beginning and ending letters, serving the same purpose and generally no
other.  St. Paul then accepts the epistolary form of his day, but pours
into it an increasing wealth of personal meaning[2].  Thus in this
place the necessary address--'Paul the apostle {47} to the believers in
Jesus Christ which are in Rome, greeting'--is expanded into a
salutation extraordinarily full of meaning, explaining (1) who it is
who writes the letter; (2) with what justification; (3) to whom; and
(4) with what greeting.

(1) It is Paul who is writing, and he describes himself both personally
and officially.  Personally, since the day when he surrendered himself
on the road to Damascus, he has been 'the slave of Jesus Christ,' bound
in all things to do His will, and exulting all the time in the moral
liberty which that bondage gave him.  Officially, he has received a
commission and an office equal to that of the older apostles in the
kingdom of Christ: he has been 'called to be an apostle, separated to
proclaim the good tidings of God.'

(2) It is then this glorious commission that justifies his writing.
These good tidings of God are the fulfilment of an age-long promise for
which the world had been waiting.  Of ancient days there were
'prophets,' men commissioned to speak for God, whose writings remained
after them and are held in highest reverence as 'holy scriptures.'
These men foretold good days from God that were to come to His people
in the {48} coming of the divinely anointed king, the Christ.  And now
they are come.  God has sent to redeem men not a servant, but His own
Son.  True, He came as man among men: as one of the royal house of
David, the house from which the Christ was promised; yet simply man in
outward nature and appearance, or 'according to the flesh.'  But
besides that ordinary seeming manhood, there was in Him something
higher--a sacred spiritual nature.  And this higher nature it was that
finally determined the estimate in which He was to be held.  If
'according to the flesh' He was a man of David's house, according to
this 'spirit of holiness' He was decisively designated by God's own act
as Son of God in miraculous power, and that especially when He was made
the example of a resurrection from the dead.  Thenceforth 'Jesus' of
Nazareth is 'Christ' and 'the Lord' of Christians.  It is He through
whom St. Paul and his fellows received the outpouring of the divine
bounty for their own lives, and their apostolic commission on behalf of
the name of Christ to bring all the nations of the earth to the
obedience of faith.  And this commission extends as far as the Roman
Christians and justifies St. Paul in writing to them.

{49}

(3) To all the Christians at Rome, then, 'called to be saints,' i.e.
called into the consecrated body and to the consecrated life, St. Paul
is writing.  He does not say 'to the church which is at Rome,' as in
the other epistles of this date he writes 'to the church at Corinth'
and to 'the churches of Galatia.'  And though this might be accidental,
yet probably it is due to the fact that St. Paul thought of the Roman
Christians as individuals who, many of them, had been converted
elsewhere and for various reasons had come to be living at Rome; so
that in fact they had hardly yet attained the consistency of a single
ordered church.

(4) And to these Christians he gives his greeting by wishing for them
those gifts which may be taken as summing up the blessings of Christ
about which this epistle is to say so much--'grace,' which is God's
love to us in actual operation, and 'peace,' which is the state of mind
of one who realizes God's love--from the Father and the Son.  This
benediction is, however, but a Christian form of that of Aaron, 'The
Lord make his face to shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee: the
Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace[3].'


{50}

Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called _to be_ an apostle, separated
unto the gospel of God, which he promised afore by his prophets in the
holy scriptures, concerning his Son, who was born of the seed of David
according to the flesh, who was declared _to be_ the Son of God with
power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection of the
dead; _even_ Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom we received grace and
apostleship, unto obedience of faith among all the nations, for his
name's sake: among whom are ye also, called _to be_ Jesus Christ's: to
all that are in Rome, beloved of God, called _to be_ saints: Grace to
you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.


There is, I believe, nothing in the above analysis which is not implied
at least in the original language of this salutation.  And it is a
remarkable summary of the grounds of St. Paul's Christian belief, more
exact and explicit than the 'Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the
dead, of the seed of David, according to my gospel[4].'  There are some
points in it which require further notice:--

1.  The use of 'spirit of holiness' in connexion with Christ (in ver.
4).  Here it is put in antithesis to 'the flesh,' i.e. Christ as He
appeared to the outward eye in His natural manhood; and describes,
vaguely and without further definition, the higher nature of which,
behind {51} His visible manhood, men became conscious[5].  Elsewhere
'spirit' is more exactly used to describe (1) the human spirit in us or
in Christ[6]; (2) disembodied persons or angels or devils[7]; (3) the
Holy Ghost[8]; (4) the being of God[9]; (5) generally what has will and
consciousness, as opposed to the merely external, the 'flesh' or the
'letter[10].'  Sometimes, as in 2 Cor. iii. 17, it is hard to feel sure
about the exact shade of meaning.

2.  We have here, in a very brief compass, St. Paul's conception of
'Christian evidences.'  He begins from Christ, 'according to the
flesh.'  'And why,' asks Chrysostom, 'did he not begin from the higher
side?  Because Matthew also, Luke and Mark, begin from the lower.  One
who would lead others upwards must begin from below.  And this was in
fact the divine method.  First they saw Him (Christ) as man on the
earth, and then perceived Him to be God.'  It was, in other words,
through the {52} experience of His manhood that they arrived at His
Godhead.  And the evidence of His divine sonship was in part
miraculous; but it was not mere miracle.  It was miracle 'according to
a spirit of holiness.'  It was miracle filled with spiritual and moral
meaning.  It was a resurrection vindicating perfect righteousness.

3.  The phrase 'the resurrection of the dead' is translated more
exactly by Wiclif 'agenrisynge of dead _men_!  Christ's resurrection is
the great example of what is to be general.

4.  The obedience of faith exactly describes the human faculty as it
showed itself in St. Paul himself at his conversion.  With him to
believe was, without any possibility of question, to obey Him whom he
believed, and St. Paul knows no faith which does not involve a like
obedience; cf. xv. 18; xvi. 26; 1 Pet. i. 2.



[1] Acts xxiii. 26.

[2] The salutation of the First Epistle to the Thessalonians, the
earliest epistle, is the most nearly formal.  Those to the Romans and
to Titus are the fullest and richest.

[3] Num. vi. 25, 26; see Hort, _First Ep. of Peter_, p. 25.

[4] 2 Tim. ii. 8.

[5] Cf. 1 Tim. iii. 16, 'justified in the spirit,' where the use is
approximately the same.

[6] See 1 Thess. v. 23; 1 Cor. v. 5; James ii. 26; Matt. v. 3; xxvi.
41; 1 Pet. iii. 18; Mark viii. 12.

[7] Luke xxiv. 39; Heb. xii. 23; i. 14; Matt. viii. 16, &c.

[8] Matt. iii. 16; Luke x. 21, R.V. &c.

[9] John iv. 24.

[10] John vi. 63; Rom. ii. 29; 2 Cor. iii. 6.




{53}

CHAPTER I. 8-17.

_St. Paul's introduction._

The salutation is immediately followed by a passage in which St. Paul
introduces himself specially to the Christians at Rome.  He had a
delicate task to perform.  The Roman Christians had been gathered
probably from many parts of the empire, because Rome was the centre of
all the world's movements, and adherents of whatever was going on in
the empire were sure by force of circumstances to find their way to
Rome.  Thus, though no apostle had yet preached at Rome, Christians had
gathered there.  Many of them had not seen St. Paul's face.  But they
had heard of him, no doubt, in Jewish circles as a very dangerous man
who was upheaving and subverting established traditions and principles.
He was a man to be looked at askance.  He must introduce himself
therefore carefully.  It was of the greatest importance {54} to him,
the Apostle of the Gentiles, that he should gain full recognition among
these Christians at Rome, the centre of the Gentile world.  We observe
then in this introduction what a gentleman, if I may say so, in the
very deepest sense of the term, St. Paul shows himself to be.  He
speaks indeed with an admirable mixture of tact and candour.  We can
hardly conceive any better address in a delicate situation than this
address of St. Paul with which he makes his approach to the Roman
Christians.

He begins with what is pleasant for them to hear, namely, that the
report of their faith throughout all the world is a good one.  'I thank
my God through Jesus Christ for you all that your faith is proclaimed
throughout the whole world.'  Then he goes on to add, as is usual in
his introductions, that he continually prays for them.  It was a remark
of General Gordon's that it makes a great difference in our feeling
towards a stranger if before we meet him we have prayed for him.  And
we may with equal truth say that it makes a great difference in the
feelings of others towards us if they have reason to believe that we
have prayed for them.  St. Paul therefore gives himself this advantage.
He says, 'God is my witness, whom I worship in my {55} spirit in the
gospel of his Son, how unceasingly I make mention of you always in my
prayers.'  Then he goes on to tell them that he not only prays for
their welfare, but prays that he may have the advantage of seeing them
face to face and knowing them.  And here he puts his desire to see them
on the true ground.  He wants to visit them because he has something of
the utmost value to give them--that he may 'impart unto them some
spiritual gift.'

Whatever may be the exact nature of the 'spiritual gift' St. Paul is
thinking of, it is clearly something for which his bodily presence is
necessary.  There is some divine power which he as an apostle can
communicate to them only when he comes among them.  In this sense he
means that 'when he comes to them he will come in the fulness of the
blessing of Christ[1].'  He implies that the Roman Christians needed
him and must wait for him to supply their deficiencies.  But we observe
that with beautiful tact he at once balances this assertion of a divine
power entrusted to him for their good, by representing his own need of
them.  He does not speak _de haut en bas_ as if he had everything to
give and nothing to receive.  {56} No: as the people depend on the
apostle for spiritual gifts, so he depends on the people for spiritual
encouragement.  He must live by the experience of their spiritual
growth.  'I desire,' he says, 'to come to you that I may impart unto
you some spiritual gift, to the end that ye may be established' (built
up and made strong in the faith).  And then he interprets:--that is 'in
order that I with you may be encouraged[2] among you, each of us by the
other's faith, both yours and mine.'

Then he goes on to tell them why he in particular is bound to come to
them, though hitherto he had been hindered by circumstances.  It is
because he is 'a debtor.'  St. Paul was the Apostle, not of the Jews,
but of the Gentiles.  Therefore he is in debt to all the Gentiles till
he has given them the gospel, and more particularly to the centre of
the Gentile world, to Rome.  And he would owe no man anything.  He
would have no unsatisfied creditors.  He will pay his debt therefore to
the Roman Christians.  'I am a debtor,' he says, 'both to Greeks and to
barbarians'--that is to all the Gentiles, whether they were of Greek
race or not.  And {57} the Greeks were so identified with civilization
or education that this leads him on to say, 'I am a debtor both to the
educated and to the uneducated.'  This general debt includes Rome.  It
was natural to include the dwellers at Rome under the head of Greeks,
for it was through the medium of Greek that St. Paul made his appeal to
them.  And, in fact, the Christians at Rome were, for the first two
hundred and fifty years or more of the Church's life, a Greek-speaking
people--a Greek colony in the Latin city.  Only towards the end of the
third century did the Roman Church become latinized in language and
spirit.  St. Paul then is a debtor to these Greek-speaking dwellers at
Rome.  'So as much as in me is I am ready to preach the gospel to you
also that are in Rome.'

But the name of Rome was, as he thought of it, a name of awe.  It
brought in upon his mind the tremendous undertaking that lay before him
and before the Christian Church as they found themselves confronted
with this vast imperial organization, which might at any time lay its
iron hand upon them to stop their progress.  Therefore he adds that,
even in view of Rome, he has courage in his heart: 'for I am not
ashamed of the gospel,' even under the shadow {58} of the mighty name,
and though it was 'to the Jews a stumbling-block and to the Greeks
foolishness.'  And why?  Because he knows what the gospel means.  It is
not mere words; it is a power.  It is a 'power of God,' a divine force,
which, like the wind, bloweth where it listeth, and which nothing can
stop.  It is a power of God.  It is a power of God 'unto salvation,' a
power that is to work men's deliverance, and that in the deepest sense.
Roman emperors not very long after St. Paul's time are commemorated in
public inscriptions as 'saviours of the world[3].'  That is in the
sense of maintaining peace and civil order.  But Christ's salvation was
of a deeper sort.  It was salvation from the bondage of sin, a
salvation which enabled people to be truly and eternally free.  It is a
power of God unto salvation, and that 'to every one that believeth,' on
the mere basis of the simple willingness to take God at His word; 'to
the Jew first and also to the Greek.'  'For'--and here St. Paul reaches
the great text of his whole epistle--'therein' (that is, in the gospel)
'is disclosed,' or revealed here and now in the world, {59} 'a
righteousness of God.'  By this phrase it will appear that he means
both a righteousness which is God's own, and also a righteousness which
God gives to men; for the gift of God is real moral and spiritual
fellowship with His own life.  This is what is now offered to men.  A
righteousness of God is revealed, starting from faith and at every
stage moving on upon the support of faith, 'a righteousness of God by
faith unto faith'; and that not in repudiation of the old covenant, but
in fulfilment of its vital principle: 'as it is written.'  For the
words of Habakkuk may be interpreted to express the central spirit of
the Old Testament--'the righteous shall live by faith[4].'


First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for you all that your faith
is proclaimed throughout the whole world.  For God is my witness, whom
I serve in my spirit in the gospel of his Son, how unceasingly I make
mention of you, always in my prayers making request, if by any means
now at length I may be prospered by the will of God to come unto you.
For I long to see you, that I may impart unto you some spiritual gift,
to the end ye may be established; that is, that I with you may be
comforted in you, each of us by the other's faith, both yours and mine.
And I would not have you ignorant, brethren, that oftentimes I purposed
to come unto you (and was hindered hitherto), that I might have some
fruit in you also, even {60} as in the rest of the Gentiles.  I am
debtor both to Greeks and to Barbarians, both to the wise and to the
foolish.  So, as much as in me is, I am ready to preach the gospel to
you also that are in Rome.  For I am not ashamed of the gospel: for it
is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the
Jew first, and also to the Greek.  For therein is revealed a
righteousness of God by faith unto faith: as it is written, But the
righteous shall live by faith.


1.  Origen's comment on the words 'through Jesus Christ' (at the
beginning of this section) is very interesting.  'To give God thanks is
to offer a sacrifice of praise, and therefore he adds "through Jesus
Christ," as through the great high priest.'  Indeed, the doctrine of
the high priesthood of Christ, if it is not mentioned in St. Paul's own
epistles, is implied there from the first.

2.  St. Paul, we notice, expresses his intention to come to Rome with
reserve, 'if by any means by the will of God' ... 'so much as lies in
me.'  And this reserve was no matter of mere words.  He was going up to
Jerusalem with an offering of money, about which he felt the greatest
anxiety, and he knew not how he would be received, or what would befall
him[5].

3.  It is not possible to decide what sort of {61} 'spiritual gift' St.
Paul is thinking of.  We know that as an apostle he was qualified to
impart the Holy Ghost by the laying on of hands, and that certain
'gifts' frequently accompanied His inward presence.  Thus, 'when Paul
had laid his hands upon some men at Ephesus, the Holy Ghost came on
them; and they spake with tongues and prophesied.'  We know, further,
that the Corinthian Church, whence St. Paul was writing this letter,
was specially rich in 'spiritual gifts,' such as 'tongues and
prophecy.'  On the other hand, the Roman Christians had not yet
received an apostolic visit and they may have been lacking in such
endowments, while the reception of them would be calculated to
encourage them and strengthen their faith.

It is possible, therefore, that he refers to a gift of this kind, and
the exact language he uses certainly suggests some definite endowment,
for the bestowal of which his bodily presence was necessary.  The
thought of the miraculous power working through him, 'the power of
signs and wonders, the power of the Holy Ghost[6],' was not far from
his mind when he wrote this epistle.

Origen's comment on this passage also is {62} interesting.  'First of
all we ought to learn that it is an apostolic work to long to see our
brethren, but for no other reason than that we may confer on them
something in the way of a spiritual gift if we can, and if we cannot,
that we may receive in the same kind from them.  Otherwise, the longing
to go about among the brethren is not to be approved.'


We cannot doubt, I think, that when St. Paul's letter was read at Rome
this introduction, so full of tact, would have given him access to many
hearts inclined at starting to be prejudiced against him.



[1] Rom. xv. 29.

[2] 'To encourage' and 'encouragement' are probably the best words to
translate what in our Bible is rendered by 'comfort.'

[3] Hadrian and Trajan: see _C.I.G._ vol. ii. p. 1068, No. 2349 m.;
vol. iii. p. 170, No. 4339, p. 191, No. 4380.  These references I owe
to Mr. H. W. B. Joseph, of New College.

[4] Hab. ii. 4; cf. app. note A on meanings of the word 'faith.'

[5] Rom. xv. 25 ff.; Acts xx. 22.

[6] Rom. xv. 19.




{63}

DIVISION I.  (CHAPTERS I. 18-III. 20.)

_The universality of sin and condemnation._

St. Paul has enunciated his great thesis.  There has arrived into the
world a new and divine force making for man's fullest salvation: the
disclosure of a real fellowship in the moral being of God, which is
open to all men, Jew and Gentile equally, on the simple terms of taking
God at His word.  This word of good tidings St. Paul is to expand and
justify in his epistle; but first he must pause and explain its
antecedents.  Why was such a disclosure needed at this moment of the
world's history?  Why has St. Paul spoken of 'salvation,' or why does
he elsewhere speak of 'redemption,' instead of expressing such ideas as
are most popular among ourselves to-day--development or progress?  It
is because, to St. Paul's mind, man as he is is held in a bondage which
he ought to find intolerable, and the first step to freedom lies in the
recognition of this.  Again, why does St. Paul {64} lay such emphasis
on faith, mere faith, only faith--why is he to insist so zealously on
the exclusion of any merit or independent power on man's part?  It is
not only because faith, the faculty of mere reception and
correspondence, represents the normal and rational relation of man to
God, his Creator, Sustainer, Father.  It is also, and with special
emphasis, because there has been a great revolt, a great assertion of
false independence on man's part; and what is needed first of all is
the submission of the rebel, or much rather the return of the prodigal
son, simply to throw himself on the mercy of his Father and acknowledge
his utter dependence upon Him for the forgiveness of his disloyalty and
his outrages, as well as for the fellowship which he seeks in the
divine life.  The fuller statement therefore of St. Paul's gospel must
be postponed to the uncloaking of what man is without it.  The note of
severity must be struck before the message of joy.  We must be brought
to acknowledge ourselves to be not men only, but corrupt men--men under
the divine wrath--doomed men powerless to deliver ourselves, and ready
therefore to welcome in simple gratitude the large offer of God's
liberal and almost unconditional love.

{65}

It is to produce this acknowledgement that St. Paul now addresses
himself.  This argument of the first part of the epistle is a very
simple one.  It elucidates two plain propositions:--

1.  that the wrath of God is, and is necessarily according to eternal
and unalterable principles of moral government, and in the case of
every man without any possibility of exception, upon sin.

2.  that all men, Jews and Gentiles, are held in sin, and therefore lie
under the divine wrath.

Thus St. Paul immediately follows up his initial statement of the
revelation of a divine righteousness with the assertion of another
'revelation' made plain to the consciences of men.  'The wrath of God
is being revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and
unrighteousness of men,' and he proceeds to demonstrate the prevalence
of sin first of all in the heathen world and to lay bare its meaning.




{66}

DIVISION I.  § I.  (CHAPTER I. 18-32).

_Judgement on the Gentile world._

Before we read this passage certain points should be plain to our minds.

1.  By sin St. Paul means essentially wilfulness--wilful disobedience.
There is such a thing as an inheritance of moral weakness or perversity
which passes to men without their fault and without their knowledge.
This, the real existence of which hardly any one can deny, is what is
called original sin; and later on we shall find St. Paul speaking of
it.  But it is not what is most properly called sin.  God is absolutely
equitable.  'Sin is not reckoned' as sin in His sight, apart from
knowledge and will.  Sin, most properly speaking, begins and ends where
wilful disobedience begins and ends.  St. Paul on this matter is
completely at one with St. John {67} when he makes sin and lawlessness
identical as realities in the world.  'Sin is lawlessness[1].'  And we
cannot even make a beginning of advance along St. Paul's line of
thought till we recognize the real existence of sin as something
different in kind from ignorance or weakness or lack of development,
and as an incomparably greater evil than those.  Sin is the created
will setting itself against the divine will.  It is, as a state or an
act, the refusal of God.  And the recognition of the awful existence of
this refusal of God is the main clue to understanding the miseries of
the present world.

2.  Sin therefore, involving as it does _wilful_ disobedience, can only
be spoken of as prevalent over the heathen world because, not merely
one chosen race, but all men in general have had the opportunity of the
knowledge of God.  St. Paul indeed elsewhere modifies the general
assertion of the fact which he makes in this place, by broadly
recognizing that there are states of human existence which are low in
their moral standard, but are rendered comparatively guiltless by the
absence of moral knowledge--states of life where sin exists but is not
reckoned {68} as sin[2].  For 'sin,' he says, 'is not reckoned' as sin
where there is no enlightening law and no consequent condemnation of
conscience.  But in this passage, looking at humanity in general, he
asserts, like the author of the Book of Wisdom or the perhaps
contemporary Jewish author of the Apocalypse of Baruch[3], that all men
have had the opportunity of knowing God from His works in nature, and
that their present state is the result of a wilful refusal of Him.
They are 'without excuse.'  The sources of the natural knowledge of God
are indeed twofold, for there is the moral conscience, individual and
social, of which St. Paul speaks later; but here it is the evidence of
nature alone of which St. Paul speaks: the witness of the creatures to
'the {69} invisible things' or attributes of their creator, that is to
say, to His power and (generally) His divinity.

3.  Assuming then the opportunity of the knowledge of God as lying
behind human records, St. Paul traces the history of sin.  It had its
roots in the refusal of the human will to recognize God and give Him
the homage of gratitude and service due to Him.  Men 'held down the
truth in unrighteousness,' that is, restrained it from having free
course in their hearts and in the world because of the painful moral
obligations which it involves.  Knowing God, they refused to
acknowledge Him with thankfulness or 'give Him the glory.'  Rather they
would themselves 'be as gods.'  They 'refused to have God in their
knowledge.'  Then from this root in the rebel will sin passed to the
obscuring of the understanding, as is shown in the ridiculous
aberrations of idolatry.  'They became vain in their reasonings, and
their senseless heart was darkened; professing themselves to be wise,'
the nations in their worship showed themselves fools.  Idolatry had
long ago appeared simply ridiculous to Isaiah: he pointed the finger of
scorn at the idolaters.  'They know not,' he cried, 'neither do they
{70} consider: the Lord hath shut their eyes that they cannot see, and
their hearts that they cannot understand.  And none calleth to mind,
neither is there knowledge nor understanding to say, I have burned part
of the wood in the fire; yea, also I have baked bread upon the coals
thereof; I have roasted flesh and eaten it: and shall I make the
residue thereof an abomination? shall I fall down to the stock of a
tree?  He feedeth on ashes: a deceived heart hath turned him aside,
that he cannot deliver his soul, nor say, Is there not a lie in my
right hand[4]?'  Isaiah's language and thought had been elaborated and
developed in the Book of Wisdom[5], and St. Paul appropriates it.  To
mistake creatures for the Creator, or to think of the glorious and
spiritual God as if He were in the form of the corruptible body of man
or beast or bird or reptile--so St. Paul alludes to the man worship of
Greece and the animal worship of Egypt--is simple blindness and folly;
blindness and folly in which St. Paul sees the just punishment of {71}
the rebellious will in the region of the intellect.  But it has another
punishment in the region of the appetites or passions.  As men
deliberately 'repudiated' the knowledge and obedience of God, God
'repudiated' men in penal retribution.  He gave them up to become vile
in their own eyes and to find out their impotence to control their own
lusts.  They ran riot even in all sorts of unnatural and lawless ways,
so that the world became full of sins of all kinds; sins against God
and sins against man; antisocial sins of all sorts, the sins which
destroy the state and friendship and commerce and the home: and at the
last the very ideal of righteousness had come to be lost.  St. Paul, we
notice, makes the lowest moral stage of all to consist, not in merely
doing these wicked things, but in abandoning all distaste for
them--consenting unrestrainedly to those who do them; and this
profoundly true remark explains the moral impotence of much that is
from other points of view excellent in Greek literature.

4.  For the punishment of all this sin St. Paul is not content to look
to the 'day of judgement,' though that is to be the final and
characteristic expression of divine wrath, and that 'day of wrath' he
still probably anticipated in the more {72} immediate future; but he
sees already in the actual world of human society as he knows it the
manifold evidence of the divine wrath here and now.  Men are receiving
in themselves the fitting reward of their perversity.  Their life has
found its own punishment.  The divine wrath is actually disclosed in
the facts of experience.  'Look,' St. Paul seems to say, 'at the way
men are living, and ask yourselves if there is any interpretation but
one of the facts you see.  There is but one conclusion possible.  God
has condemned and is showing His wrath on the human nature which He
made.'  Just in the same way in an earlier epistle St. Paul speaks of
the Jews, even before the destruction of Jerusalem, as already judged,
already the subject of the divine wrath[6].  And God's method of
judgement is this.  The punishment lies in the natural consequences of
the lawless actions.  The wages of sin is also its fruit[7].  And
further, this punishment of sin involves the increased liability to sin
again.  One sin 'gives us over' to another, as one good action
facilitates another.  This idea was familiar to Jewish teachers.  Among
the 'sayings of the Fathers' we find, 'Every fulfilment of duty is
rewarded by another, {73} and every transgression is punished by
another[8].'  St. Paul, in fact, in this chapter, may be said to be
concentrating for the Christian Church all that is best and deepest in
the moral philosophy of Judaism.

Now we are in a position to read the first section of St. Paul's
argument without perhaps finding any single idea to the interpretation
of which we have not a clue.


For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness
and unrighteousness of men, who hold down the truth in unrighteousness;
because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God
manifested it unto them.  For the invisible things of him since the
creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the
things that are made, _even_ his everlasting power and divinity; that
they may be without excuse: because that, knowing God, they glorified
him not as God, neither gave thanks; but became vain in their
reasonings, and their senseless heart was darkened.  Professing
themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the
incorruptible God for the likeness of an image of corruptible man, and
of birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.

Wherefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts unto
uncleanness, that their bodies should be dishonoured among themselves:
for that they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and
served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever.
Amen.

{74}

For this cause God gave them up unto vile passions: for their women
changed the natural use into that which is against nature: and likewise
also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their
lust one toward another, men with men working unseemliness, and
receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was due.

And even as they refused to have God in _their_ knowledge, God gave
them up unto a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not
fitting; being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness,
covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit,
malignity; whisperers, backbiters, hateful to God, insolent, haughty,
boastful, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without
understanding, covenant-breakers, without natural affection,
unmerciful: who, knowing the ordinance of God, that they which practise
such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but also consent
with them that practise them.


1.  Perhaps the first question which arises in our minds when reading
this passage is, whether St. Paul's general account of the heathen
world is not unjustifiably severe.  Does he not paint it too black?  In
fact, the account he gives coincides with the account given by other
Jews of the Gentile world as in their experience they found it; and
this, we must remember, means the Gentile world of the great cities of
the empire.  They thought, as they moved about the world and saw what
they could not but {75} see, that God had forsaken the Gentiles because
they refused to acknowledge His law.  There was sin enough in Israel,
but it was remediable.  The sin of the Gentiles was irremediable.  God
had forsaken them[9].  This last idea is of course one entirely alien
to St. Paul's mind.  To him all God's judgements, at least in this
world, have one intention--to awaken men to recognize the truth and to
stir them to conversion, 'that he may have mercy upon all.'  But
otherwise St. Paul's view of the Gentile world, as he experienced it in
the cities of mixed Greek and Asiatic population of the Roman Empire,
and especially in the notoriously wicked Corinth where he was
writing[10], was the ordinary Jewish view.  And a contemporary Stoic
philosopher, who wrote at Ephesus under the name of Heracleitus, gives
a picture of society in that city fully as black[11].

At the same time, if we are to be fair, we must recognize that the
account, while true, is not complete.  The Gentile life was not without
its 'salt.'  There was a great deal of virtue, both domestic and
philosophical, in the {76} empire--more perhaps in the country, of
which St. Paul knew little, than in the towns.  And the existence of
this salt he acknowledges when, in the second chapter of this epistle,
he speaks of Gentiles which have no revealed law but do by nature the
things of law, being a law unto themselves, and having the effect of
the law written in their hearts, and a witnessing conscience,
individual and social, to help them[12]: and again, when he intimates
that there is an uncircumcision which puts the circumcision to shame by
keeping the law[13].  But it is not St. Paul's way to exactly correlate
the different aspects of his subject as a modern writer would do.  He
is a prophet and preacher, not a formally systematic writer.  It is
enough for him that the sin which he is describing is a reality: that
its tendencies are what he describes them to be: that, whatever other
counter tendency there may be, sin is so dominant in the world that its
results are as he represents them, and that the conscience and
experience of those to whom he writes will respond to his indictment.

Nor, if we give its metaphorical meaning to 'idolatry,' is there a word
which St. Paul says in this chapter which would not be true of our {77}
modern civilization in London or Paris or New York.  With us indeed
Christianity has been sufficiently vigorous to provide a counteracting
force, of infinitely stronger power than existed in the Roman world, to
resist corruption.  The agencies of divine strength and recovery, the
centres of health and light, are infinitely more numerous, stronger,
more constant, more progressive.  But the world of sin is still what it
was: and always there lies upon it the same stamp of the divine
condemnation.  We look around on the life of our city, with its selfish
and disgusting lusts, with its drunkenness, with its enervating luxury,
with its selfish wealth, with its reckless and immoral gambling, with
its dishonest commerce, with its grasping avarice so neglectful of the
lives of those whom it makes its instruments: we look round, I say, not
on the whole life, but on the sinful life of our city, and we see what
human nature is plainly meant not to be, either in its characteristics
or in its miserable issues.  And by the interval between what we see
life to be and what we know it was meant to be, we can measure the
reality of the divine judgement.  The facts press upon us the truth
which St. Paul would teach.  The sinful life is a condemned life.  Here
is an {78} actual disclosure of the wrath of God upon all
unrighteousness and sin.

2.  But what will 'science' say to St. Paul's account of human
degeneracy and degradation?  Does not St. Paul seem to talk, as
moralists in general have been disposed to talk, as if the course of
the world's history had been a downward course? and is not this the
religious view? and is it not directly opposed to the scientific view
of a gradual process of development and advance?  This is a very common
form of question to suggest itself to our minds.  And the answer to it
appears to be this[14]:--The biblical view of the world is not by any
means that as a whole it has gone from bad to worse.  It recognizes
periods and areas of degradation, and suggests periods and areas of
stagnation.  And this is what anthropology and history equally suggest.
But its main concern is with the history of one particular line of
human advancement under divine guidance through Abraham and Moses and
prophets and kings, through Christ and His Church: an advancement which
is to be finally world-wide, and even more than world-wide, in its
effects.  Other lines of progress in civilization and knowledge {79}
the Bible recognizes but is not largely concerned with.  But it is in
its general effect thoroughly in accord with science, which suggests
not general and equable advance over the whole region of humanity, but
advance in special departments along the line of select races,
continually impeded in its progress by counter tendencies, by periods
and areas of degradation, and still more of stagnation[15].  Science,
indeed, utters no word of promise at all as to the ultimate result of
all this evolution[16].  It is faith, of whatsoever sort, not science,
that can make us optimistic as to the issue of human history.

But no doubt the Bible does throughout postulate the existence of sin;
and it claims that sin everywhere, and from the first, has been a cause
of degradation in the individual and the race.  Now here is the real
point at issue in the relations of religion and science.  The {80} main
question is not about human origins or a primaeval fall.  It is simply
on the comparatively easy field of actual human existence.  Is human
freedom--freedom within limits to choose and act--a reality?  Can man
therefore misuse this freedom to do what he need not have done and
ought not to have done?  And has he, in fact, constantly been doing
morally wrong things, wilfully and knowingly, which he need not have
done?  Does, therefore, the area of human history present at every
stage a result or product which human wilfulness and lawlessness, that
is, sin, has contributed to spoil and to degrade below its natural
level?  Now it is this--the real existence of countless human actions
which need not have been and ought not to have been--which contemporary
science, with a necessitarian bias, is largely occupied in denying.
Granted the reality within limits--limits which have no doubt often
been grossly exaggerated, but granted the reality within due limits--of
human freedom, and therefore the possibility and reality of actual sin
and guilt and degradation which need not have been, I do not believe
there remains any serious conflict in the moral region between religion
and science.  The conflict, I say, is continually {81} being taken back
into the region of original sin or the original fall.  But this is a
quite secondary area of debate, in which I believe there can be no
serious disagreement, if there is agreement in the primary area of
actual human sin.  The universal moral consciousness and common sense
of man bears witness to the fact that we can do and do do what we ought
and need not.  It recognizes, moreover, the moral truth of St. Paul's
idea that this lawlessness of the will has its perverting effects on
the intelligence and on the passions.  The human conscience then
responds to St. Paul's account of the origin and history of human sin,
and of its fruits both in the individual and in society.  And if
psychological science is inclined to deny the very existence of any
faculty of free choice such as makes sin possible, it will be found on
examination to be going very far beyond what it can prove.  For the
reality of guilt and sin, and the degradation which results from it, we
have the human consciousness; against it we have no positive evidence:
nothing in fact but the habitual unwillingness of specialist science,
physical or theological, to recognize its limits.

3.  St. Paul finds the root of sin in the refusal {82} of man in
general to recognize God.  He asserts that they might have known Him,
or rather did know Him, but declined to act on that knowledge.  Now it
is noticeable that he does not ascribe this knowledge of God, which he
declares to have been possible to man everywhere, to an original
revelation, nor even in this place to the moral conscience, but to the
evidence of nature.  In this, as in his ridicule of idolatry, he is in
accordance, not only with Jewish thought, but with contemporary Greek
philosophy.  The argument from design had become habitual in the
schools, having been stated first of all with transparent simplicity by
Xenophon in his account of the reasoning of Socrates.  St. Paul then
finds in this instinctive inference from nature up to nature's God, 'a
testimony of the soul naturally Christian.'  He is able, at Lystra and
Athens, to assume that men will respond to it.

It is another question, into which St. Paul does not specifically
enter, how far back in human history the appreciation of this reasoning
goes.  But it is worth noticing that among our contemporary
investigators of the history of religion, some at least of the most
acute have been coming back to what we may call a modified {83} form of
the doctrine of an original monotheism[17].  They think that even
savage religions generally bear traces, that are plainly independent,
of a belief in one great and mostly good God; and that there is no
evidence that this higher belief was developed out of the lower belief
in manifold spirits of more ambiguous characters.  They see no reason
to suppose that the higher belief has been gradually arrived at within
any period into which the human mind can penetrate with its
investigations or its well-grounded conjectures.  Humanity appears to
them to have been haunted from its origins with this belief in the one
God; and they regard all the higher religious movements as attempts not
so much to arrive at, as to retain hold on, a belief which is
continually in danger of being overlaid and forgotten.  It does not
appear that anthropological science is at all likely to disprove such a
view which on the other hand has a great deal of evidence to justify
it.  At least, the {84} evidences of deterioration in the history of
religion are manifold and conspicuous.  The lowest view of God and man
is not by any means always the oldest.  And the recognition of such
facts is quite consonant with the doctrine of the evolution of religion
in its more reasonable forms.

Meanwhile, every one is in sufficient harmony with St. Paul's argument
who recognizes the universal facts of sin and guilt and needless moral
deterioration among men; and who recognizes also that the secret of sin
is the wilful refusal on men's part to know God as they might have
known Him, and obey Him as they might have obeyed Him.

4.  Besides these difficult questions, we should mark what is both
plain and instructive, that St. Paul regards man as necessarily living
either above himself or below himself.  Man's true nature is to be in
dependence upon God.  Therein is his true liberty and dignity of
sonship.  When he tries to be independent, to be his own master simply,
he loses the true principle of self-government and becomes the victim
of his own passions.  God 'gave men up,' handed them over as slaves to
dishonouring passions.  This theory of human nature is intimately bound
up with all St. Paul's {85} teaching about grace and redemption, and we
shall hear more of it.

5.  We shall do well to notice, finally, one consequence which follows
from recognizing that the lowest stage of moral degradation lies, not
merely in doing what is wrong, but in having ceased to disapprove of
it.  That is to say, the lowest moral stage carries with it a complete
loss of ideal, or absence of the standard of right and wrong; and this
lowest stage is anticipated before it is reached.  It follows,
therefore, and we must not forget it, that the actual conscience of the
individual, or of the society, at any particular moment affords no
adequate standard of right and wrong.  The moral conscience, like the
intelligence in general, requires enlightenment.  It supplies no
trustworthy information, except so far as we are at pains to keep it
enlightened.  More than this, its capacity to keep us admonished
depends on our habitually observing its injunctions.  To disobey
conscience is to dull it, and finally to make it obdurate and
insensitive.  The absence of conscientious objection to a particular
course of action may therefore be due either to our having neglected to
enlighten our conscience or to having refused to obey it.  The duty of
an {86} individual to himself is not only to obey his conscience, but
also take pains to enlighten it.  And the duty of the individual to
society is to make continual efforts to keep the corporate conscience
up to standard.



[1] 1 John iii. 4.  The Greek phrase implies exactly that all sin is
lawlessness, and all lawlessness is sin.

[2] Rom. v. 13, 14.

[3] Cf. Wisd. xiii. 1-9: 'For verily all men by nature were but vain
who had no perception of God, and from the good things that are seen
they gained not power to know him that is, neither by giving heed to
the works did they recognize the artificer....  For from the greatness
of the beauty even of created things in like proportion does man form
the image of their first maker....  But again even they are not to be
excused.  For if they had power to know so much ... how is it that they
did not sooner find the Sovereign Lord of these his works?' Apoc. Bar.
liv. 17, 18: 'From time to time ye have rejected the understanding of
the Most High.  For his works have not taught you, nor has the skill of
his creation which is at all times persuaded you.'

[4] Isa. xliv. 18-20.

[5] Wisd. xi. 15; xiii, xiv, xv.  St. Paul's debt to the Book of Wisdom
is apparent (1) in the kinds of idols he mentions; (2) in the way in
which the thought of idolatry leads on to that of uncleanness and
sexual immorality; and (3) in the idea of retribution by the natural
law of results.


[6] 1 Thess. ii. 16.

[7] Butler's _Analogy_, part i. ch. 2.

[8] _Pirqé Aboth_, iv. 2 (cited by S. and H.).

[9] S. and H. p. 49.

[10] He implies, as Dr. Farrar points out, 1 Cor. v. 9-10, that pure
society did not exist in Corinth.

[11] See my _Ephesians_, pp. 91, 92, 255.

[12] Rom. ii. 13-15.

[13] Rom. ii. 26.

[14] See also app. note E on physical science and the fall.

[15] Cf. F. B. Jevons, _Introd. to the Hist. of Religion_ (Methuen),
pp. 394, 395: 'Everywhere it is the many who lapse: the few who hold
right on.  The progressive peoples of the earth are in a minority.'
'Though evolution is universal, progress is exceptional.'

[16] Cf. Huxley, _Evolution and Ethics_ (Romanes Lecture, 1893,
Macmillan), p. 36: 'The theory of evolution encourages no millennial
anticipations.  If, for millions of years, our globe has taken the
upward road, yet, some time, the summit will be reached, and the
downward route will be commenced.'

[17] The allusion is to (1) Jevons (_op. cit._ cap. xxv), who seems to
think some 'amorphous' form of monotheism may very probably lie behind
totemism.  He strongly repudiates the notion that the lower form is
necessarily the older.  (2) Andrew Lang, _Making of Religion_
(Longmans, 1898), chaps. ix and xv.  Cp. also Orr's _Christian view of
God and the World_ (Elliot, 1893), pp. 212 ff., and notes E, F, G.




{87}

DIVISION I.  § 2.  CHAPTER II. 1-29.

_Judgement on the Jews._

St. Paul in his judgement of the Gentile world is but repeating, with
more of moral discernment, what he would have learned in his Jewish
training.  But the strict Jews who had taught St. Paul, though some
among them must have been good men, ready to enter into the deeply
penitential spirit of their psalmists and prophets, do not seem as a
rule to have liked to think of their own people as liable to divine
condemnation.  They chose to suppose that the Gentile world alone was
the area upon which divine vengeance would light, while the Jews were
to appear as the instruments of God's judgements, or at least
themselves exempt from them.  They had forgotten all the superabundant
warnings against such a spirit which the prophets from Amos to John the
Baptist had let fall.  This frame of mind--censorious when {88} it
looks without, lenient to the point of blindness when it looks
within--sometimes appears when one thinks of things in the abstract as
almost impossible, in the form at least in which St. Paul here proceeds
to attribute it to the Jews.  We can hardly believe that any
responsible beings could be so blind as St. Paul implies that his pious
fellow-countrymen were.  But it needs only experience to convince us
that even in its grosser forms this frame of mind is extraordinarily
common in individuals, in nations, and in churches.  Certainly the
nation of England is not, and the representatives of religious England
too often are not, exempt from the common failing.  And in the case of
the Jews we have also the witness of our Lord.  He represents the
religious Jewish world as honeycombed with hypocrisy of a plain and
gross sort.  They are to Him very types of the men who behold the mote
that is in their brother's eye, but consider not the beam that is in
their own eyes.  St. Paul's witness then is only the same as the
Christ's.

Here then St. Paul turns abruptly upon a Jew who may be supposed to
have been listening to the indictment of the Gentiles with expressions
of sympathy, and bids him look {89} within and recognize that the Jew
also falls under the same indictment and on the same grounds.  And he
proceeds sternly to cut away any possible ground of confidence which he
might derive from the thought that he had 'Abraham to his father.'
God's judgement is directed by an absolutely impartial 'truth' or
estimate of the facts in their inner reality.  If in any particular
case of persistent sin His judgement seems to linger, it is not that He
has forgotten or will overlook; it is only that He is merciful and
forbearing, and gives long space for repentance[1].  But, meanwhile, if
the opportunity is not taken, if the heart is hard and impenitent, a
store is being laid up against the offender in the place of judgement,
which will break out in the great day in manifested wrath.  God's
principle of judgement is absolutely free from partiality.  There are
men {90} who have steadily in view the true aim of human life, its
imperishable glory, its final and permanent honour, and, therefore,
preferring eternal to temporal things, patiently go on doing good; they
may be Jews or Greeks, but in either case indifferently, the reward
that they have sought will be theirs with the accompaniment of inward
peace.  There are other men who are contentious, and refusing the
leading of the truth, make themselves servants to unrighteousness.
They may be Jews or Gentiles, but the divine wrath, showing itself in
outward suffering and inward anguish, will be upon them all equally.
For God judges men impartially in the light of their opportunities.
Those who have the advantage of a revealed law shall be judged and
acquitted according as they have, not listened to it merely, but obeyed
it.  For a law known and not kept, so far from commending us to God, is
but the instrument of our judgement.  And those who have not this
advantage are yet not without an inward light in the natural moral
consciousness of mankind.  Those who have sinned against this light
shall find nothing else was needed to bring them to their ruin.  And
those, on the other hand, who by its help keep the moral law in effect,
without {91} any assistance from a revealed law, are their own law for
themselves.  They have the law in its practical result written in their
hearts as their conduct shows, and their natural conscience bears its
accompanying witness.  For conscience, both individual and social,
reflecting on all human actions to condemn, or, more rarely, to acquit,
anticipates the final divine judgement which, as St. Paul continually
announces, it will be the office of Jesus the Christ to pass unerringly
upon things secret as well as open in the 'day of the Lord.'

The specially revealed law on which the Jew relied, which it is his
boast to have received from God, and in virtue of which he could
rightly claim to have a knowledge of divine things which other men had
not, and to be the teacher of the nations, the interpreter to other men
of the divine will--this law finds its first application to those
themselves to whom it is given.  How can they preach the commandments,
whether it be the eighth or the seventh or the second that is in
question, so long as they have so bad a reputation for keeping them?
They cannot deny that as of old, so now, their moral conduct causes the
heathen to blaspheme their religion, instead of {92} being drawn
towards it.  To have received circumcision in physical fact is of no
profit at all, unless it be accompanied by the obedience of which the
mark in the flesh is but the symbol.  Disobedience is in God's sight
uncircumcision.  And where the obedience is, God will reckon it as if
the symbol were there also.  The morally obedient Gentile will sit in
judgement on the morally disobedient Jew.  For that is the divine
principle.  God everywhere and always looks to the spiritual reality as
it is seated in heart and will, and is satisfied never by outward
distinctions.  Jew (Judah) means 'praise.'  But if the Jew is to merit
his name, he must not be satisfied with the applause of men.  He must
commend himself to God who sees the heart.


Wherefore thou art without excuse, O man, whosoever thou art that
judgest: for wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself; for
thou that judgest dost practise the same things.  And we know that the
judgement of God is according to truth against them that practise such
things.  And reckonest thou this, O man, who judgest them that practise
such things, and doest the same, that thou shall escape the judgement
of God?  Or despisest thou the riches of his goodness and forbearance
and longsuffering, not knowing that the goodness of God leadeth thee to
repentance? but after thy hardness and impenitent heart treasurest up
for thyself wrath in the {93} day of wrath and revelation of the
righteous judgement of God; who will render to every man according to
his works: to them that by patience in well-doing seek for glory and
honour and incorruption, eternal life: but unto them that are factious,
and obey not the truth, but obey unrighteousness, _shall be_ wrath and
indignation, tribulation and anguish, upon every soul of man that
worketh evil, of the Jew first, and also of the Greek; but glory and
honour and peace to every man that worketh good, to the Jew first, and
also to the Greek: for there is no respect of persons with God.  For as
many as have sinned without law shall also perish without law: and as
many as have sinned under law shall be judged by law; for not the
hearers of a law are just before God, but the doers of a law shall be
justified: for when Gentiles which have no law do by nature the things
of the law, these, having no law, are a law unto themselves; in that
they shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience
bearing witness therewith[2], and their thoughts one with another
accusing or else excusing _them_; in the day when God shall judge the
secrets of men, according to my gospel, by Jesus Christ.

But if thou bearest the name of a Jew, and restest upon the law, and
gloriest in God, and knowest his will, and approvest the things that
are excellent, being instructed out of the law, and art confident that
thou thyself art a guide of the blind, a light of them that are in
darkness, a corrector of the foolish, a teacher of babes, having in the
law the form of knowledge and of the truth; thou therefore that
teachest another, teachest thou not thyself? thou that preachest a man
should not steal, dost thou steal?  {94} thou that sayest a man should
not commit adultery, dost thou commit adultery? thou that abhorrest
idols, dost thou rob temples? thou who gloriest in the law, through thy
transgression of the law dishonourest thou God?  For the name of God is
blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you, even as it is written.
For circumcision indeed profiteth, if thou be a doer of the law: but if
thou be a transgressor of the law, thy circumcision is become
uncircumcision.  If therefore the uncircumcision keep the ordinances of
the law, shall not his uncircumcision be reckoned for circumcision? and
shall not the uncircumcision which is by nature, if it fulfil the law,
judge thee, who with the letter and circumcision art a transgressor of
the law?  For he is not a Jew, which is one outwardly; neither is that
circumcision, which is outward in the flesh: but he is a Jew, which is
one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, not
in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God.


1.  As at the end of the first chapter we asked whether St. Paul was
fair to the Gentile world, so now we ask whether he is fair to those of
his own race whose religious tendencies he had known so well from
inside.  And the answer again is that he undoubtedly represents aright
the dominant tendency and temper among them.  The prophets had always
had to fight against the natural but false idea of divine election,
which held the Jewish race secure in the favour of Jehovah, simply
because He was their God and they were His people.  They bring to bear
{95} all the activities of an inspired intelligence and heart to make
their fellow-countrymen perceive that they are only secure in God's
favour so long as they are like Him in character.  Now down to the
period of the Captivity, the prophets could also denounce the people
because they were constantly false to Jehovah in matters of worship as
well as of morality.  After the Captivity, however, the tendency to
idolatry is gone for ever.  After the Maccabean period the exclusive
and legitimate worship of Jehovah becomes a matter of passionate
enthusiasm in the Jewish race.  Henceforth therefore their danger from
the false idea of election passes into a new phase.  We must be in the
favour of God, they now could plead, because we have Abraham to our
father, and because we keep to the worship of our God with an
irreproachable zeal for His law.  Against this sort of strengthened
pleading John the Baptist, the last of the prophets, aims his bare
moral teaching.  God's wrath is just about to fall upon His people he
declares, because it lacks in real moral righteousness.  Repent ye, be
changed, get you a new heart--is his one word of preaching.  This
keynote passes intensified into the teachings and the denunciations of
Christ.  Nothing {96} more surely stamps the narrative of 'the woman
taken in adultery' as historically genuine[3], than its profound truth
to the moral attitude of Christ in face of Scribes and Pharisees.  The
point of His reply to their trial question is that they who would
enforce a divine law, and thus stand for God before the world, must
themselves be morally sound.  'He that is without sin among you, let
him first cast a stone at her.'  It is moral conformity, not merely
orthodoxy, which qualifies us to act for God.  It is then precisely
this attitude of Christ towards the Jews zealous for the law, which St.
Paul is reproducing in the passage which we have just read.

He suggests also in its last words--where he is playing on the meaning
of the name of Judah--another deep element in Christ's depreciation of
the religious spirit of the Jews.  Their religion was a matter of
public opinion--with all the stagnancy which belongs to the public
opinion of a compact society--not a matter which lived with ever fresh
life in the inner relation of the conscience to God.  'How can ye
believe which receive glory one of another, and the glory which cometh
from the only God ye seek not?' {97} St. Paul then is certainly right
in his estimate of Jewish religion.  One indeed who describes with as
vivid reality as he does the pride of a Jew in his religious
privileges--one who had all the reason that Saul of Tarsus had for
knowing what it was to feel this emotion from within--could hardly have
been wrong in his estimate of its weaknesses.

And if the particular moral defects which St. Paul attributes to the
religious Jew are surprisingly grave--theft, adultery, and
temple-robbery--here too what he says out of his own experience is
confirmed from other quarters.  Avarice was a notorious sin of Jews.
Our Lord accuses the Scribes of 'devouring widows' houses[4]' under
cloak of religion, and denounces the Pharisees also for leaving their
outwardly purified cups and platters inwardly full of 'extortion.'  It
is only a subtler form of theft that He alludes to when He denounces
them for sanctioning the practice of dedicating property as a 'corban'
to the purposes of religion in order to evade the righteous claims of
parents.  The story of Susanna, the brief but stern words of our Lord
about the seventh commandment in His Sermon on the Mount, and His {98}
significant language on the occasion already alluded to of the woman
taken in adultery, interpret St. Paul's language as to sins of the
flesh.  And the language of the town clerk at Ephesus in exculpating
St. Paul and his company, suggests that 'temple-robbery' was a not
unfamiliar imputation upon Jews.  It appears that with all their horror
of idols--and though everything connected with an idol was expressly
declared to be 'an abomination,' unless it had been already desecrated
by Gentiles[5]--they could not always resist the opportunity of
appropriating the rich stores of the temples.  The 'religious' Scribes
and Pharisees (though not of course the best of them) were, in fact, as
a body truly hypocrites, as our Lord summarily said they were.

And there lies in the moral failure of the Jews a very much needed
warning to us nineteenth-century Christians against censoriousness.
'Judging' occupies so large a part in our ordinary conversation.  In
the religious world, we condemn so freely--Romanists, Dissenters, those
who are of a different party to ourselves: in the social world--those
of a different class, those who employ us, or whom we employ, {99}
those whom in any way we do not like or who go contrary to us.  We are
always judging.  But to judge, we are taught, is a great
responsibility.  With what judgement we judge, we shall be judged.  It
is of the utmost consequence that before we judge others we should have
judged ourselves.  And to have done that truthfully has a tendency to
make us charitable in our estimate of others, because we are deeply
conscious of our own need of merciful and lenient consideration.

2.  What St. Paul teaches about the moral consciousness, and
possibility of moral goodness, among the Gentiles has not a Jewish
sound at all.  The Jewish teachers generally would not have admitted
any goodness acceptable to God in the heathen world.  In fact, St. Paul
is here, as in his speech at Athens, accepting the principle of a
universal presence and operation of God in the human heart, outside the
limit of any special revelation, and he accepts it in terms largely
derived from current Stoic philosophy.

The Stoics, arising when the Greek city life was decaying, contemplated
man as an individual, and undertook to show him how to lead a good
life.  A good life means a 'life according {100} to nature,' or
'according to reason': the reason of the individual being a part of the
universal reason or God.  And as a help in living according to reason,
the Stoics laid stress upon the conscience in each man, i.e. a faculty
lying behind his ordinary surface self, passing judgement according to
reason upon his actions, and 'making cowards of us all,' inasmuch as we
all do wrong.

'No one,' said Seneca, St. Paul's contemporary, 'will be found who can
acquit himself; and any man calling himself innocent has regard to the
human witness, not to his own conscience.'  He quotes an 'admirable
saying of Epicurus,' 'The beginning of safety is the knowledge of sin.'
He inculcates the duty of strict self-examination, and tells us how he
performed it himself at night: 'when the light is removed, and my wife,
who is by this time aware of my practice, is now silent, I pass the
whole of my day under examination.'  Then he 'opens out his conscience
to the gods.'  And this conscience is to every man a sort of inward
God[6].  It is in fact the representative in each man of the universal,
immutable, and divine moral law, the {101} law of nature, in conformity
with which is the only true freedom and citizenship of the world.  'For
this' (the world of the moral order), said another contemporary of St.
Paul, also a philosopher, 'is the common home of all, and its law is no
written document (letter), but God.  And if a man transgresses what the
law imposes, he will be impious; or rather he will not dare transgress,
for he could not escape.  Justice has many furies, watch-dogs for
sins[7].'  There is in Cicero's _Republic_ a magnificent expression of
the principle of the law of nature: 'There is a true law which is right
reason, agreeable to nature, diffused among all men, constant, eternal,
which calls us to duty by its injunctions, and by its prohibitions
deters us from wrong; which upon the good lays neither injunction nor
prohibition in vain; while for the bad, neither its injunctions nor its
prohibitions avail at all.  This law admits neither of addition nor
subtraction nor abrogation.  The vote of neither senate nor people can
discharge us from our obligation to it.  We are not to look for some
other person to expound or interpret it; nor will there be one law for
Rome and another for Athens, nor {102} one at this date and another
later on; but one law shall embrace all races over all time, eternal
and immortal; and there shall be hereby one common master and commander
of all--God, who originated this law and proposed it and arbitrates
concerning it; and if any one obeys it not, he shall play false to
himself and shall do despite to the nature of man, and by this very
fact shall pay the greatest penalties, even if he should escape all
else that is reckoned punishment.'  It is of interest to notice that
the words cited by St. Paul before the Areopagus[8], 'We are also God's
offspring,' occur in a hymn of the Stoic Cleanthes, full of the thought
of man's relation through his reason to the universal and divine law.

Of this type of thought and language then St. Paul avails himself, in
spite of the immense differences which disclose themselves below the
surface between the Stoic and the Christian ideas of God.  He avails
himself of Stoic phraseology about men being God's offspring in his
speech at Athens, as being in accordance with what he, the Christian
apostle, had to teach.  And here he adopts in substance the Stoic
language with regard to conscience.  As by inference from {103} nature
all men can know of God's power and divine attributes, so, St. Paul
says, from the witness of conscience they may know the principles of
His moral government[9].  St. Paul, however, rightly refuses to be
satisfied with the individual conscience.  The social judgement--the
social verdicts of condemnation or acquittal continually being
passed--co-operate with it to anticipate the judgements of God.  And in
virtue of the inward light of reason, and the conscience[10] both
individual and social, he held that men who lie outside the region of
special revelation can possess the moral law in effect in their hearts,
and, it is implied, can keep it.

St. Paul is mainly occupied in this epistle in contrasting the
Christian Church, as a region where spiritual power is given in
response to faith to enable a man to fulfil the divine law, both with
the heathen world, plunged in moral wickedness, and with the Jewish
Church in its failure to attain to divine righteousness by the law of
works--of which more hereafter.  {104} But there were among the Jews
true sons of Abraham: and there were among the Gentiles good men
acceptable to God, like righteous Job.  St. Paul does not theorize
about this.  But there is at least no reason to deny that he would have
declared these righteous men to be justified by faith and sanctified by
grace, i.e. justified by that degree of truthful correspondence with
God which was possible for them; and kept in harmony with the will of
God by His Spirit.  There is no reason to believe that St. Paul would
not have admitted some action of faith and grace among the
non-christian Gentiles, as he undoubtedly does among the prae-christian
Jews who lived under or before the law.  When he says of the good
heathen that they do '_by nature_ the things contained in the law,' he
uses the expression not as equivalent to 'by their own unassisted
powers, without the help of God,' but simply to mean 'without the help
of any special revelation[11].'

{105}

Universally then, according to St. Paul, two sources of the knowledge
of God exist; nature, with its evidences of the divine power and other
similar attributes, and conscience, with its witness to divine
righteousness.  And, though the sciences of nature and man have grown
since St. Paul's day past recognition, nothing (we may boldly say) has
really weakened either element of this double witness.  It is, and
remains true, that the only reasonable argument from the universal
order of nature is to a universal reason or mind: and that the method
by which the moral conscience may be believed to have developed out of
'animal intelligence,' makes no difference as to the cogency of its
witness to a divine righteousness, in response to which alone it could
have developed as in fact it has done.  It is worth notice also before
we leave this part of our subject, that St. Paul's line of thought
affords a true explanation of the double fact that, on the one hand,
the actual moral standards with which the conscience of different
individuals, races, and generations is satisfied, greatly varies; and,
on the other hand, that all the standards tend towards unity in a
common idea of righteousness.  The tendency towards unity St. Paul
would attribute to the divine righteousness {106} which lies behind
conscience and which it exists to reflect.  The variations would be due
to the different degrees of development reached; or still more to the
different degrees of faithfulness or unfaithfulness, attention or
inattention, with which the conscience of the race or the individual
has responded to the light.  The conscience, like the speculative
reason, is an instrument for coming to the truth; but an instrument
capable of every variety of racial or individual error or obtuseness.

3.  It appears clearly enough in this chapter, that St. Paul's
doctrines of free grace and justification by faith must be grossly and
carelessly misconceived unless they are viewed upon a deep background
of what we commonly call 'natural religion,' that is (practically) the
religion that appeals straight off to the conscience of almost all
honest and civilized men.  It is 'natural religion' to believe that God
will judge men with absolute power and insight and impartiality
according to their conduct and their characters: that there can be no
'making believe,' no substitute for a good character, and no escaping
with a bad one.  The prophets are full of this principle.  Our Lord
reasserts it.  It is emphasized by St. James, whose plain {107} point
is that we are justified not by right belief (which is what he means by
'faith'), but by a good life.  But no one could assert the principle
more simply and absolutely as the basis of all his special evangelical
teaching than St. Paul.  And whatever is true about free grace and
justification by faith only, is true because, and only because, this
free grace and this justifying faith are necessary means or steps
towards the realization of actual righteousness.  So St. Paul states
it--'that the requirement of the (divine) law might be fulfilled in us
who walk[12]' according to the principles of the 'gospel of the grace
of God.'  The doctrine of grace is rooted and based upon the truths of
natural religion, and leads up to their realization.  It has been then
a most perilous mistake when missionaries have preached the doctrines
of grace and redemption in regions where there had been no preparatory
training in natural religion--in the truth of the unity and power and
moral character of God: of the reality of our responsibility towards
Him: of His inexorable holiness: of His inaccessibility to any kind of
bribe or attempt to find some substitute for moral obedience.  Men must
have known what {108} it is to tremble in the recesses of their being
'as guilty men surprised' before God's awful righteousness; to
'tremble,' like Felix, at the message of 'righteousness, temperance,
and judgement to come,' before they can safely learn the lesson of His
grace and pardon.

And there are two minor elements in natural religion, as commonly
understood, for which St. Paul here makes himself responsible.  It has
been generally understood that all men instinctively desire their own
happiness, and that this is natural and right; and that as we should
reasonably prefer our more permanent and deeper good to what is only
transitory and superficial, so we should strive for the happiness and
satisfaction which is eternal--the eternal reward, which only the stern
pursuit of virtue can obtain for us.  This deep desire for our own
substantial happiness our Lord sanctions and continually suggests as a
principal motive for right living.  The love of others does not
annihilate it.  'Thou shalt love thy neighbour _as thyself_.'  So then
St. Paul also, following his Master, recognizes it as lying at the
heart of what is right and true in mankind, that we should 'seek' for
ourselves 'glory, honour, and incorruption'--the glory and honour which
abide {109} eternally.  It is plain that he would have us pay no heed
to that truly unnatural modern altruism which would disparage and
depreciate this motive of a right self-love, and which would treat the
desire for eternal happiness, and fear of eternal loss, as a base and
unworthy element in religion.  No doubt it is not the only motive.  It
is not even the characteristically Christian motive.  But it is a
natural and legitimate motive all the same.  It is an inextinguishable
consciousness in us that we were meant for blessedness.

But, once more, the only true happiness is moral happiness: it is a
'glory and honour' springing out of the man's character and belonging
to it: it is a happiness that is in this sense deserved.  True, the
servant of God in heaven will always feel that what he is receiving is
infinitely beyond his deserts, and that his deserts are what God has
wrought in him, not he himself.  None the less the reward springs out
of and belongs to what God has actually made him to be.  Heaven is not
a happy place in such a sense that we could be made happy by being 'put
there' by an arbitrary fiat of God.  It is fellowship with God, the
All-holy; and God's holiness is intolerable, it is 'devouring fire and
{110} everlasting burnings,' to those who are not morally like Him.
Here lies the reason why a heaven is not possible to moral beings
without the accompanying possibilities of a hell.  For the moral
possibility of acquiring the holy character involves the opposite moral
possibility: and it does not lie in the moral nature of things that the
bad character should receive anything except what it deserves--the
'indignation and wrath' which God, because He is God, must express
towards the sinful, wilful character, and which to the character itself
means 'tribulation and anguish.'  This, St. Paul says positively, must
be the lot of 'every soul of man that doeth evil.'  It is this
inevitably two-sided law that a large part of the kindly-disposed world
to-day are trying to get rid of, or to forget, on its severe and dark
side.  But it is in fact a law that works even more necessarily and
inexorably than physical laws, inasmuch as it is the expression of
God's necessary moral being.  God cannot 'let us off' the punishment of
our sins, which is only their inevitable fruit.  Nor does He disclose
to us any necessary limit to the ruin which we may work in our being.
This stern principle of natural religion is taken up into, and indeed
intensified in, the gospel.  {111} St. Paul, however, neither here nor
elsewhere uses 'immortality' to describe the future state of those whom
God condemns.  He uses it only of God and of those who enjoy the vision
of God.  The 'immortality of the soul'--the idea that every soul as
such necessarily and consciously exists to all eternity--is an idea
which the language of Scripture does not seem to warrant.

4.  There are also two less prominent points in the second chapter that
we must not entirely pass over.

St. Paul, we should find, if we were to investigate the matter, is
wholly true in his interpretation of the Old Testament in general.  He
interprets its spirit and meaning with perfect insight.  But he is not
always what we should call critically exact, any more than the other
interpreters of his day, in his use of particular texts.  Thus, in this
chapter he gives to some words of Isaiah[13] a meaning which is indeed
to be found elsewhere in the prophets[14], but does not really belong
to the original of this particular passage.  Isaiah is saying that
God's name is being blasphemed _by the oppressors of {112}
Israel_--'Continually all day long my name is blasphemed.'  But the
Greek version of the Bible inserted the words 'through you' (the
Jews[15]); and St. Paul interprets this insertion to mean that it was
the moral inconsistency of the chosen people themselves which caused
God's name to be blasphemed.  Perhaps the fact that he uses the formula
of quotation 'as it is written' after the words referred to, is a sign
that he had employed the words in his own sense before he became
conscious that they were in fact a quotation.  But in any case he shows
no anxiety to follow critically the original meaning of a particular
passage which he cites.

At the end of this passage occurs the antithesis familiar in modern
language of 'the letter and the spirit.'  In its modern sense it is
used as equivalent to the literal and the metaphorical, or the definite
and the vague.  But this is not at all its sense in St. Paul.  With him
'the letter' means the written law, and 'spirit' means, in this
connexion, what we may broadly describe as vital moral energy.  Thus,
{113} in its most characteristic use with St. Paul, the antithesis
distinguishes the mere external information as to God's will, which was
all the written law ('the letter') could give the Jews, from the
activity of the Holy Spirit or the spiritual power of moral freedom
which, through the gifts of the Holy Spirit, we enjoy under the gospel.
In this passage the antithesis is similar, but not the same.  It
contrasts the merely physical state of circumcision according to the
written law--'with the letter and circumcision' means 'having the
written law and being accordingly circumcised'--with what the Old
Testament had called 'the circumcised heart,' i.e. the really obedient
will or 'spirit' which may exist independently of the outward rite.
'Spirit,' we observe, may refer to the activity of either the Holy
Spirit of God, or of the human will, or of both without discrimination.



[1] Cf. Eccles. viii. 11: 'Because sentence against an evil work is not
executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is emboldened
to do evil.'  Ps. x. 11: 'He saith in his heart, God hath forgotten.'
Wisd. xi. 23: 'Thou overlookest the sins of men to the end they may
repent.'  Ecclus. v. 4: 'Say not, I sinned, and what happened unto me?
For the Lord is longsuffering.' 2 Pet. iii. 9: 'The Lord is not slack
concerning his promise, as some count slackness; but is longsuffering
to youward, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should
come to repentance.' Cf. also Isa. lvii. 11.

[2] Or rather 'their own conscience bearing witness with them and, in
their mutual relations, their reflections accusing or even excusing
them.'

[3] It is certainly misplaced as it stands (John vii. 53-viii. 11).

[4] Mark xii. 40; Luke xx. 47; Matt. xxiii. 25.

[5] Cf. S. and H. _in loc._

[6] See for Seneca, Lightfoot, _Philippians_, 'St. Paul and Seneca,'
pp. 278-280.

[7] See _Pseudo-Heracleitus_, Letter ix, p. 91 (Bernays).

[8] Acts xvii. 28.

[9] See Rom. i. 32 as well as Rom. ii. 14.

[10] 'Conscience,' as used by St. Paul's contemporaries and by himself,
is not a repository for positive moral guidance, but rather a faculty
for reflecting upon our own already accomplished actions.  See further,
app. note B, on the idea of conscience.

[11] See on this subject _Life and Letters of Dr. Hort_ (Macmillan),
vol. ii. p. 337: 'Faith itself, not being an intellectual assent to
propositions, but an attitude of heart and mind, is present in a more
or less rudimentary state in every upward effort or aspiration of man.'
Also Gibson, _Thirty-Nine Articles_ (Methuen), ii. p. 420.

[12] Rom. viii. 4.

[13] Isa. lii. 5.

[14] See in Ezek. xxxvi. 22: 'My holy name, which ye have profaned
among the nations, whither ye went.'

[15] Dr. Gifford suggests that the LXX was subsequently modified by St.
Paul's citation (as in the next chapter, iii. 10-18), instead of his
citation being moulded by the LXX.  Is there any evidence in support of
this view?




{114}

DIVISION I.  § 3.  CHAPTER III. 1-8.

_Jewish objections._

This passage is interesting as showing us, what is more often the case
than appears on the surface, that St. Paul has in mind as he reasons
the familiar objections of an opponent--his own objections, perhaps in
part, before he was a Christian.  St. Paul, that is to say, very
frequently writes controversially, and argues _ad hominem_: and his own
reasoning is only rightly understood when we have clearly in view what
he is opposing.  It of course very frequently happens in literature
generally that a saying is completely misunderstood, because that with
which it is contrasted is overlooked.  Thus, John the Baptist's advice
to the soldiers to 'be content with their wages' is commonly
interpreted to mean--'Be satisfied with your wages {115} as they are,
and do not ask for more.'  This might have been good advice or bad
advice to give to the soldiers, but it is not John the Baptist's.  He
means, 'Be satisfied with your pay and do not supplement it by robbery
and unauthorized exaction.'  Here then the implied contrast is
necessary to enable us to interpret aright the positive advice.
Similarly in the case of St. Paul, his doctrine of the absoluteness of
the divine election, as stated later in this epistle[1], has been
misunderstood, because it has been supposed that he is asserting the
divine absoluteness as against the claim of man to moral freedom, and
to equitable judgement in accordance with responsibility.  But in fact
this is what he is indirectly vindicating.  What he is arguing against
is the claim of the Jews that God was bound to their race.  It is
against this claim--this immoral claim to perpetual privilege on the
part of one race, however they might behave--that St. Paul exalts the
absolute freedom of God to choose or reject as He sees fit.  It is of
great importance then, especially with a writer so frequently
controversial as St. Paul, to watch continually to see which is the
phase of thought or feeling that {116} he is opposing.  Frequently, as
I say, it hardly appears on the surface of St. Paul's writing that he
really has a definite opponent in view.  Sometimes, as in the passage
now to be considered, it becomes apparent, and the argument is best
exhibited in the form of a dialogue (though to let the dialogue appear
clearly, missing links have to be supplied) thus--

_Jewish Objector._  But if all this is true--if Jews are no better off
than Gentiles--of what use is it to be a Jew?  What is the value of our
circumcision and the position into which it initiates us?  (ver. 1)

_St. Paul._  Its value is manifold.  To take one point first[2], it
lies in the fact that the oracles of God--His teaching and
promises--were entrusted to our race (ver. 2).

_J. O._  But if God thus of old gave special promises to us as His
special people, and if now we are simply like the heathen under His
wrath, the conclusion is that He has been false to His promises
(argument implied in ver. 3).

_S. P._  No: that is not to be thought of.  It is not God who has
played false, it is man: it is our race.  The Jews refused to believe:
not however all of them, but some.  If there is {117} a trial between
God and His people as to which has been true, it is God who must be
vindicated as the Psalmist says[3] (vers. 3, 4).

_J. O._  But if, as your teaching proves, all our unrighteousness is
made to serve as a background on which God makes His righteousness all
the more evident--that is enough.  Our wrong-doing serves its purpose
in this way.  God has no right both to use our wrong-doing for His own
purposes, and then, besides this, to visit His wrath upon us (ver. 5a).

_S. P._  Such thoughts our human nature suggests (ver. 5b).  But we
know they are false.  God is the judge of the world, and His action
necessarily supplies the standard of all judicial righteousness (ver.
6).

J. O.  But do consider my point.  If the result of my playing false to
God is that His fidelity is only thrown into higher relief and the
whole process ministers to His glory, why am I, the unconscious
instrument of His glory, treated as an offender? and why should I not
resolve to go on freely doing wrong (as you yourself are sometimes
accused of teaching), so as to give God more abundant opportunities to
overrule my action for the greater good?  (vers. 7, 8a.)

{118}

_S. P._  A man stands justly condemned in the very using of such an
argument (ver. 8b).


What advantage then hath the Jew? or what is the profit of
circumcision?  Much every way: first of all, that they were intrusted
with the oracles of God.  For what if some were without faith? shall
their want of faith make of none effect the faithfulness of God?  God
forbid: yea, let God be found true, but every man a liar; as it is
written,

That thou mightest be justified in thy words,

And mightest prevail when thou comest into judgement.  But if our
unrighteousness commendeth the righteousness of God, what shall we say?
Is God unrighteous who visiteth with wrath?  (I speak after the manner
of men.)  God forbid: for then how shall God judge the world?  But if
the truth of God through my lie abounded unto his glory, why am I also
still judged as a sinner? and why not (as we be slanderously reported,
and as some affirm that we say), Let us do evil, that good may come?
whose condemnation is just.


What is of interest here is to notice that St. Paul reproduces the
argument of his Jewish opponent with great sympathetic force.  It had
clearly been weighed in his own mind.  It was urged, no doubt, against
his own teaching, that it gave an excuse for sinning by suggesting that
the greatness of the sin only glorified the super-abundant greatness of
the pardoning love.  It is only too probable that some of his followers
were persuaded by some such argument or acted as {119} if they were.
Thus St. Paul states it with vigour, but thereby only makes all the
more apparent the meagreness of his reply.  Not that the argument is
such as makes reply difficult.  In a slightly different form St. Paul
deals with it elaborately in chapters ix-xi.  But here he clearly
treats it as contemptible when its true character has once been
disclosed.  And why?  Because it is professedly an explanation of the
ways of God with man, which is at the same time an excuse for
immorality.  It is an intellectual exercise at the expense of
conscience.  And St. Paul shows, by the very contempt with which he
treats it, that a man who will play false with his conscience, and then
proceed to find intellectual justifications, is not to be met in the
intellectual region at all.  He has been condemned already.

St. Paul then, we find, will not argue with one who reasons at the
expense of his conscience; and this is an important principle.  When
the intellect is acting purely, it must be free, and must be dealt with
seriously on its own ground.  But the conscience must be followed first
of all.  Its light is clearer than the light of intellect, and must be
left supreme.  Whatever be the bewilderment of my intellect, I am
self-condemned, {120} God-condemned, if I play false to the moral
light.  And arguments to the contrary, however clever-sounding or
philosophical, are in fact sophistry.  There is, we must confess, a
good deal of such sophistry to-day in the use of arguments drawn from
the current philosophy of necessitarianism and the idea of heredity.



[1] Chapters ix-xi.

[2] The points are resumed in ix. 1.

[3] Ps. xxxii.




{121}

DIVISION I.  § 4.  CHAPTER III. 9-20.

_Sin and condemnation universal._

At this point the direct argument with an opponent is dropped; and St.
Paul restates what he has so far been occupied in proving.  It is not
that Jews are in a worse position than Gentiles.  It is that all
together are involved in the same moral failure.  To deepen the
impression that this is a true statement, St. Paul culls from various
psalms and from Isaiah a series of passages describing a general state
of depravity, moral blindness, apathy, failure, unprofitableness,
falsity, hatred, and outrage against God and man.  These utterances of
the book of 'the law' (here used for the Old Testament scriptures
generally) are meant for those first to whom this law belonged.  They
condemn Jews as well as Gentiles.  They show all equally to be under
{122} divine judgement.  They prove that if the written law could teach
men God's will, it could not, by the works that it enjoined, enable him
to satisfy God.  It had its function only in teaching him to know his
sinfulness by contrast to his plainly declared duty.  The conclusion is
then that all men, Jews and Gentiles alike, are involved in sin, are
under the wrath of a holy God, and are in utter need of a deliverance
which they are incapable of procuring for themselves.


What then? are we in worse case than they?  No, in no wise: for we
before laid to the charge both of Jews and Greeks, that they are all
under sin; as it is written,

  There is none righteous, no, not one;
  There is none that understandeth,
  There is none that seeketh after God;
  They have all turned aside, they are together become unprofitable;
  There is none that doeth good, no, not so much as one:
  Their throat is an open sepulchre;
  With their tongues they have used deceit:
  The poison of asps is under their lips:
  Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness:
  Their feet are swift to shed blood;
  Destruction and misery are in their ways;
  And the way of peace have they not known:
  There is no fear of God before their eyes.

Now we know that what things soever the law saith, it speaketh to them
that are under the law; that every {123} mouth may be stopped, and all
the world may be brought under the judgement of God: because by the
works of the law shall no flesh be justified in his sight: for through
the law _cometh_ the knowledge of sin.


1.  The 'Scripture proof' which St. Paul here offers of universal human
corruption is, according to a recognized Hebrew practice, made up by
stringing together a number of separate texts,--Ps. xiv. 1-3, v. 9,
cxl. 3, x. 7, Isa. lix. 7, 8, Ps. xxxvi. 1.  They represent the
impression made by human wickedness upon the righteous observer.  The
estimate covers Israel as well as, indirectly, the world at large[1].
It is thus an authoritative rebuke to Jewish self-complacency.  It is
as if an English preacher were to rebuke similar self-complacency in
Englishmen by a collection of passages from standard English
authorities, in which our nation was judged, in common with others, in
a manner most humiliating to its pride.  It is this, though, inasmuch
as the psalmists and prophets were and are believed to have spoken
under the inspiration of the Spirit of God, it is also something more.

It is well known that, as the quotations in {124} the New Testament
have frequently affected the Greek text of the Old, so here this
conglomerate of quotations came to be attached altogether to Ps. xiv in
some Greek MSS., increasing it by four verses.  Thence they passed into
the later Latin Vulgate.  Thence into Coverdale's Bible and into the
Great Bible, and so into the Prayer Book version of the Psalms.  But
our present Bible version remains true to the Hebrew original.

2.  'To be justified,' in ver. 20, means to be acquitted, or proved
righteous, or reckoned righteous in the trial before God.  This, and
not to _make_ righteous, is the meaning of the word 'to justify,' both
in the Old and New Testament and elsewhere.  There is scarcely an
exception.  It is a forensic word, that is, a word derived from
processes of law, and it describes the favourable verdict after a
trial.  It is used of vindicating God's character to His people[2], or
of vindicating one's own character; of God's judicial acceptance of men
or men's judicial acceptance of one another[3].  And so far as real
righteousness is necessary for judicial {125} acquittal, the word
implies real righteousness, but it does not primarily mean it.

3.  Here we find briefly stated St. Paul's apparently wholly original
view of 'the law,' as given simply to enlighten the conscience by
keeping men informed as to their duty, without supplying them with any
moral assistance in performing it.  Thus the ultimate aim of the law
was to make man know his own sinfulness; to convince him that his
attempted independence was a failure, and that he could not save
himself; and so to prepare him to cry out for the gift of grace, and to
welcome it when it was given.  'The law was given,' as St. Augustine is
fond of saying, 'that grace might be sought, and grace was given that
the law might be kept.'  This antithesis is thoroughly after St. Paul's
mind.


This first division of our epistle gives us as a whole a great deal to
think about.  There are, we may say, two spiritual evils conspicuous
to-day.  People with consciences in any degree awakened are apt to be
nervous, anxious, despondent, complaining, sullen.  The second division
of our epistle supplies the antidote to this error by consolidating the
awakened conscience in divine peace.  But there is another, {126} and
perhaps more conspicuous, spiritual evil of our day which this first
division is calculated to meet--the habit of excusing oneself--the
absence of the sense of sin.

  Hold thou the good: define it well:
    For fear divine philosophy
    Should push beyond her mark, and be
  Procuress to the lords of hell.

Because philosophy and science have been bringing into prominence the
influence of heredity and physical environment on character, we use
this consideration, and often with little enough knowledge of real
science, to obliterate the sense of sin.  We are apt to regard sin as
it appears in the world at large as a result of ignorance, or social
conditions--as in one way or another a form of misfortune.  And so
viewing it in the world, we view it in ourselves.  We make excuses for
ourselves.  We have largely lost the sense that sin is wilfulness; that
it is an inexcusable offence against God; that it does, and necessarily
does, bring us under God's indignation; that necessarily, because God
is what He is, the consequences of sin in this life, and much more
beyond this life, are inconceivably terrible.  It is this sense of sin
that St. Paul must help to restore in us.  We must believe {127} that
God is holy, and we must learn to tremble under His necessary holiness,
before we can in any right sense realize that He is loving.  We must
learn once again to be really penitent; to confess our sins in general
and in particular with utter humiliation; to expect the divine
judgement upon them; to use with reality the stern language about sin
of the Bible and the Prayer Book.  And learning this for ourselves with
regard to our own personal sins, we must learn also to feel, like
Daniel, what our church and nation deserve in God's sight.  We must
confess our own sins and the sins of church and nation[4]--aye, of the
human race.  Only through such a restoration of evangelical severity
can there be a restoration of evangelical joy.  The deepened sense of
personal sin is the needful step to spiritual progress.  Certainly no
more in our case than in that of the Jews will orthodoxy, or ritual
accuracy, or frequent services, or superior education, or philanthropic
zeal, be accepted as a substitute for moral severity, for the spirit of
penitence and the readiness for penance.  Let us judge ourselves,
brethren, that we be not judged of the Lord.

And it is all-important what our standard of {128} judgement is.  The
Jews failed because they judged themselves by a mainly external and
therefore easy standard.  So do most respectable Englishmen.  We are
satisfied if we do nothing discreditable.  But the religious sense of
sin, as it is experienced by the psalmists, or St. Paul, or Luther, or
John Keble, arises from the intense perception of a personal relation
to the All-Holy.  The 'falling short,' or rather 'experienced need[5],'
of which St. Paul goes on to speak, is the experienced need of
something very lofty, to which it is possible for men to be quite
insensible--'the glory of God.'  God's divine brightness, the eternal
light, streams forth into nature.  'The whole earth is full of His
glory.'  Man also in his natural and moral being is meant to have
fellowship with God.  He is meant for the divine glory also.  It is in
proportion as he realizes what he was meant for, and becomes conscious
in himself of a capacity for God, that his present actual pollution and
sinfulness becomes a reality to his consciousness.  It is in the light
of God, {129} and in aspiration after the glory of God, that the sense
of sin really awakens.  'Thou requirest truth in the inward parts,'
says the Psalmist.  'Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned.'  'If
thou, Lord, shouldst be extreme to mark what is done amiss, Lord, who
may abide it?'[6]



[1] Dr. King (The Psalms in Three Collections, &c.: Cambridge, 1898)
has remarked that Ps. xiv. 1-3 closely resembles the general
condemnation of 'all flesh upon the earth' in Gen. vi. 5, 12.

[2] Cf. above ver. 4, from Ps. xxxii.

[3] See Ps. li. 4; Job xxxii. 2; Prov. xvii. 15; Isa. v. 23; Matt. xi.
19; Luke vii. 29; x. 29; xvi. 15.

[4] Cf. Dan. ix. 4-20.

[5] The word for 'fall short' in ver. 23 is a 'middle' verb, and
apparently implies not only failure in point of fact, but conscious
failure.  Thus in Luke xv. 14, the prodigal son begins to _feel_ his
destitution (middle).  But in Matt. xix. 20, the rich young man asks,
'What, as a matter of fact, is wanting to me' (active)?  See Gifford,
or S. and H. _in loc._

[6] Cf. app. note C, on recent reactions from the teaching about hell.




{130}

DIVISION II.  CHAPTERS III. 21-IV. 25.

_Justification by faith only._

§ 1. (III. 21-31.)

_Christ our propitiation._

Now we have been brought to recognize the true state of the case as
between ourselves and God--the facts about ourselves as we are in God's
sight.  We were meant for fellowship in the divine glory.  'The glory
of God,' says an old Father, 'is the living man: the life of man is the
vision of God.'  But, meant for fellowship in the divine glory, we have
fallen short of it and have come to appreciate our failure.  We have
sinned, and that universally and wilfully.  We are such that God cannot
accept us as we are: the 'day of His appearing' could be for us but a
'day of wrath.'  And in this dire situation we are helpless.  We can
supply no remedy.  'Can the Ethiopian change his {131} skin, or the
leopard his spots?  Then may ye also do good that are accustomed to do
evil[1].'  But to acknowledge this--to abandon the claim so dear to the
human heart, that we can be independent and manage our own life
successfully: to repudiate all our false pride, and to come before God
all of us on the same level, confessing our failure and our sin--this
is to let man's necessity be God's opportunity, and to open the
flood-gates of the divine righteousness.  God is righteous in all the
richest meaning of that word, and that righteousness of His He is now
extending to us and giving us admittance into it.  And this He does
purely and simply as His gift.  On His side it is pure and gratuitous
giving, on our side simple and unmeritorious receiving.  We contribute
nothing.  No distinctions are admitted between those inside the law and
those outside it.  The gift is quite apart from the law, though law and
prophets bore witness to it.  No questions are admitted as to what we
have done or what we have left undone.  Purely and simply out of the
freedom of His love, who is our Creator and our Father, now, when a
bitter experience has taught us again our true attitude towards Him, He
offers us {132} admission into His righteousness, all on the same
level, if we will simply believe in Jesus Christ His Son, that is, take
Him at His word and believe His promises (vers. 21-24).

And what is this offer?  It is, first of all, what befits the captives
of sin: it is redemption.  God, who of old bought His people out of
captivity in Egypt, without any co-operation of theirs, by a pure act
of His power, has now again, without any co-operation of ours, but by a
manifestation this time of self-sacrificing love, in the person of
Jesus Christ, bought our freedom from sin.  And this redemption He
offers to us first of all in the form which befits sinners conscious of
sin and guilt, as the mere gift of forgiveness, the mere power to break
with the past, the mere right to stand and face the future with a clean
record.  For as the brazen serpent was lifted up before the eyes of
rebellious Israel, bitten of the fiery serpents, and those who looked
unto it lived, so upon the open stage of history God set forth Jesus
Christ shedding His life-blood--obedient, that is, to God and
righteousness unto death, even the death of the cross.  And this
sacrificial shedding of the life-blood of the Son of God--to which we
{133} contributed nothing[2]--is accepted by the Father as
propitiatory, that is, as something which enables Him to show His true
character of righteousness, and to acquit or accept among the
righteous, irrespective of what he has done or been, every one who has
faith in Jesus (vers. 24-26).

And why (we in our age are disposed to ask) did not God simply declare
His forgiveness? why this roundabout method of a propitiatory
sacrifice?  It was (St. Paul's language suggests) to prove or vindicate
His righteousness, which means both holiness and mercy.  All the long
ages past of the times of ignorance, God had been 'overlooking' or
'passing over' sins in His forbearance, never 'suffering His whole
displeasure to arise,' but allowing all nations to walk in their own
ways and to find out their own mistakes and helplessness[3].  The
result of their being thus left to themselves was that men did indeed
become conscious of their misery {134} and need, but also came to
entertain all sorts of slack or unworthy ideas about God.  A mere
declaration of forgiveness might have left men with an impression of an
easy-going or 'good-natured' God who would make light of sin.  But the
awful burden laid upon Jesus on account of human sin, the awful
sacrifice of His life which He readily offered, restores the sterner
element to our thoughts about God, just at that crisis or opportunity
in the divine dealings, when by God's declaration of free forgiveness
we are made to feel His love.  God does forgive us, but it costs Him
much.  And no one who under these conditions comes and takes at the
hand of Jesus the gift of pardon can fail to receive with it the awful
impression of the divine holiness and of the severity of the divine
requirements.  All the former 'passing over of the sins done aforetime'
was made morally possible because God had in view that 'now at the
present season,' or opportunity, He would 'show,' or prove, His whole
righteousness, and be before men's eyes the righteous being that He is
in fact (righteous rather than merely 'just'); and be able, without the
danger of a great misunderstanding, to give His righteousness full
scope by admitting into {135} it, by a pure act of pardon, every one
who comes simply taking Jesus at His word[4].

Here then there is no room for pride or glorying.  It is utterly
excluded because there is here no consideration of human merit.  It is
a pure and unmerited boon of the divine bounty bestowed, without
reference to any law known or observed, simply on those who, utterly
confessing their need, accept in faith the offer of love.  Again there
is no reference to any chosen race.  Jew and Gentile, circumcision and
uncircumcision, are all in the same case.  All have the same need.  God
is the same, with the same offer, for all alike.  He will accept the
Jew because he believes, and He will accept the Gentile with no other
equipment but his faith.  Yet this principle of faith involves no
repudiation of the principle of law; rather, it realizes the very end
which law was intended to serve (vers. 27-31).


But now apart from the law a righteousness of God hath been manifested,
being witnessed by the law and the prophets; even the righteousness of
God through faith in Jesus Christ unto all them that believe; for there
{136} is no distinction; for all have sinned, and fall short of the
glory of God; being justified freely by his grace through the
redemption that is in Christ Jesus: whom God set forth _to be_ a
propitiation, through faith, by his blood, to shew his righteousness,
because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the
forbearance of God; for the shewing, _I say_, of his righteousness at
this present season: that he might himself be just, and the justifier
of him that hath faith in Jesus.  Where then is the glorying?  It is
excluded.  By what manner of law? of works?  Nay: but by a law of
faith.  We reckon therefore that a man is justified by faith apart from
the works of the law.  Or is God _the God_ of Jews only? is he not _the
God_ of Gentiles also?  Yea, of Gentiles also: if so be that God is
one, and he shall justify the circumcision by faith, and the
uncircumcision through faith.  Do we then make the law of none effect
through faith?  God forbid: nay, we establish the law.


i.

For our understanding of this famous passage a good deal depends on our
fixing, as exactly as possible, what the 'righteousness of God' here
spoken of means.  Beyond all question it means in part God's own moral
character.  This is quite certain, as in the Bible generally, so in
this very chapter[5].  But it is also certain that God's character is,
especially in this epistle, viewed as revealed to us in such a sense
that we can take hold of it and become identified with it.  {137} Thus
(especially in i. 17) _human_ faith is spoken of as the starting-point
or region for revealing divine righteousness.  It extends to and
embraces the believers[6].  It is a righteousness communicated to us
from God on the basis of faith[7].  The 'righteousness of God' is what
we men are to become[8].  This transition of meaning from what God is
in Himself to what we are by the gift of God is of course thoroughly
natural.  The grand idea of the Bible is that of a moral fellowship
between man and God.  The grand idea of the New Testament is, further,
that of a disclosure and communication to us of the divine life.

And what is this moral quality described by 'righteousness' which
belongs to God and is communicated to us?  Righteousness is a term
belonging primarily to man.  A righteous man, in the Old Testament, is
one who fulfils all that is expected of him, one who is
blameless--towards man, but especially towards God.  But if God expects
such and such conduct in men it is because of what He Himself is.  His
requirements express His character.  God Himself therefore is believed
to be righteous, incorruptibly and awfully righteous.  But a great
{138} strain is put upon this belief in the 'wild and irregular scene'
of this world, the Governor of which appears so often indifferent to
the sufferings of His most faithful servants.  Thus the righteous cry
out to God to vindicate Himself, and God's righteousness is, in the Old
Testament, largely identified with God's vindication of His own
character by righteous acts or judgements accomplished in the past or
expected in the future; acts of such a character as that in them the
wicked and insolent are put to confusion, and the meek and holy
justified and exalted.  Such righteous judgement is expected to
characterize the kingdom of the Christ.  Of course, in the general
lowering of moral ideals among the Pharisaic Jews, the idea of
righteousness suffered with all else.  The righteous came to mean those
who strictly keep the outward Jewish law; and God's righteousness was
identified with His expected vindication of those who keep the law,
i.e. the pious Jew, at the coming of the Messiah[9].  Our Lord, and His
disciples after Him, were engaged in nothing so much as in deepening
the idea of righteousness again.  Especially it is something much more
than the mere observance of outward ordinances.  {139} It was, in fact,
the fundamental error of the Jews to confuse the two.  Righteousness in
man must be real likeness to God, and God's righteousness is His holy
character which He is now once more manifesting in the gospel of His
Son; a character which is still shown in acts of justice[10], in
punishing the wicked and rewarding the righteous, but which manifests
itself also more especially as love, and by gracious promises of
forgiveness and acceptance[11].  Thus, in Rom. i. 17, 18, the present
'revelation of divine righteousness' is a gracious manifestation which
is put in contrast to the 'revelation of divine wrath,' the place of
which it is intended to take.  And yet, though the quality of mercy is
made emphatic, it is not isolated.  God's righteousness is not mere
good nature.  It would not be rightly revealed by any mere ignoring or
passing over of sin.  God's mercy is inseparable from His holiness, and
His righteousness includes both[12].  It needed the severe requirement
of the atoning sacrifice, as well as {140} the free gift of forgiveness
and new life, to prove or exhibit it.

And if God's righteousness shows itself first of all in a simple act of
justification of sinners--in simply forgiving men or pronouncing them
righteous, irrespective of what they are in themselves at the moment,
if only they will take God at His word--three points have to be borne
in mind.  First, that the mere offer of forgiveness is put in the
forefront because this readiness on our part to be treated as helpless
sinners is the annihilation of the one great obstacle to our
reconciliation with God--the proud independence which led the Jews, and
has led men since their day, to resent being dealt with by mere mercy,
and to want to justify themselves.  If the Christian character is to
grow aright, it must have its root in an utter acknowledgement that we
owe to God our power even to make a beginning in His service: that we
can run the way of His commandments, because, and only because, He by
His own act has set our hearts at liberty.

  Just as I am, without one plea
  But that Thy blood was shed for me,
  And that Thou bidst me come to Thee,
      O Lamb of God, I come!

{141}

To many really good Christians this sort of language has come to have
an unreal sound because they have been surfeited with it, and because
it has been associated with a very one-sided Christianity.  But, for
all that, the moral necessity remains that we should dig out of its
last refuges the claim of human independence, if the Christian
character is to grow healthily.  In other words, the only root of
Christian thankfulness and progress is the recognition that our
spiritual life rests at its basis on a pure act of the divine bounty in
accomplishing our redemption from sin and giving us the forgiveness of
all our sins.

Secondly, it must be borne in mind that our forgiveness through the
sacrifice is only the first step towards fellowship with God.  It is
only the removal of the preliminary obstacle which guilt had raised
against actual admittance into the life of God.  The language of the
New Testament refuses to allow us to separate the forgiveness of our
sins from our admission into the 'body of Christ' by baptism[13], or,
in other words, our incorporation into the life of the redeemed people,
the new Israel.  For the faith {142} which accepts forgiveness is the
same identical quality which corresponds with all the later movement of
the new life.  God's free gift of grace is not forgiveness only, but
forgiveness and new life; it is 'forgiveness of sins and an inheritance
among them that are sanctified by faith that is in Christ[14].'  St.
Paul does not contemplate, or contemplates only to repudiate, a faith
which accepts forgiveness and stops there--indifferent to actual
holiness or baptismal incorporation.  For it would be no real faith at
all.  The preliminary justification or acquittal is simply and solely
to serve as a basis for the life of consecration and glory.  The stages
of justification and sanctification are separable in idea but not in
fact.  The refusal to proceed from the threshold of the acquittal into
the palace of the new life would expel even from the threshold; even as
the failure of the unthankful servant to behave as one should behave
who has been excused the debt he could not pay, cancelled all his
acquittal and left him with the weight of the old debt rolled back upon
him to his destruction.

Lastly, and in one word, it must never be left out of sight that even
the initial movement of {143} faith, the taking Christ at His word and
believing His promises, involves the element of moral allegiance.  His
gracious person and character attract even while the boon is being
accepted, and a new motive enters into life.  Justifying faith at its
very root is a faith which yields allegiance to its object.


ii.

To a Jew, and to almost all races when St. Paul wrote, the idea of an
expiatory sacrifice for sin seemed natural and obvious.  But for the
special Christian doctrine of expiation the basis is to be found in the
memorable chapter liii of the 'later Isaiah.'  That great prophet of
the captivity is assuring Israel of their restoration to their own
land.  This restoration is to follow on the due punishment of her
sins--'She hath received of the Lord's hands double for all her sins.'
And the restored people is to be, before all else, a righteous
people--'all righteous'--a people of God's favour, because they are
living according to God.  But there is so much sin still remaining in
them as to make it necessary that the new life of the recovered people
should be based on a great act of {144} propitiation.  The Righteous
Servant of Jehovah, who is, at starting, the idealized people itself,
but who comes to be represented as an individual acting for the people
while repudiated by them, offers his life a willing sacrifice for their
sins.  The chastisement of their iniquities falls on him, and he
accepts the burden, and is obedient unto death.  Dying he makes his
soul a guilt offering: and, living through death exalted and powerful,
he becomes an intercessor accepted with God, the head of a new seed
whom he 'justifies' before God by the intimate knowledge of God's mind
and character which in his voluntary humiliation he has won.  This
wonderful prophetic picture represents a vast advance in moral teaching
on what had gone before.  It is not only that the self-sacrifice of a
perfect human will is substituted for the animal victims to which the
enlightened conscience of God's people already refused to allow any
real efficacy; but also that the idea of propitiation is put in a
context where it is made plain that it can only be the prelude to a
state of actual righteousness in those who are to be justified by it.
It occurs as part of the answer to the question, not--How is Israel to
escape punishment? but, How is Israel to {145} become the really
righteous nation, living in the likeness of God?

In the later books of the Maccabees we have this idea of the expiatory
sacrifice and intercession of the ideal Israelite still retained, but
degraded, probably under Greek influences.  'And I, as my brethren,'
says the Maccabean martyr, 'give up both body and soul for the laws of
our fathers, calling upon God that he may speedily become gracious to
the nation ... and that in me and my brethren may be stayed the wrath
of the Almighty, which hath been justly brought upon our whole
race[15].'  'Be propitious to my race,' prays Eleazar, in another
Alexandrian version of the story, 'being satisfied with our punishment
on their behalf.  Make my blood a propitiation for them, and receive my
life as a substitute for theirs[16].'  These passages are on a lower
moral level than Isaiah's, because in them the prominent idea of
propitiation is that it is a means of procuring from God exemption from
further punishment, not a step to the restoration to holiness.  The
idea both of what God desires and of what man desires is lower.  And
indeed all conceptions of propitiation may be distinguished into true
{146} or false, according as righteousness or exemption from punishment
is the end which is specially in view.

Thus when we pass on into the New Testament we find in Caiaphas'
saying, 'It is expedient for you that one man should die for the
people, and that the whole nation perish not[17],' the typical
expression of the quite immoral notion[18] of the forcible sacrifice of
an innocent person in order to exempt a guilty race from punishment.
In our Lord's teaching, on the other hand, we find the doctrine of
atonement raised to its highest moral power.  As the Forerunner had
revived the teaching of the later Isaiah by pointing to Him as 'the
Lamb of God who taketh away (i.e. taketh up and expiateth) the sin of
the world[19],' so Christ Himself spoke unmistakeably of the new
covenant which He came to inaugurate, as to be based upon the
sacrificial offering of His body and the outpouring of His blood[20]:
spoke also of 'the remission of sins' as the benefit to be expected
{147} from His expiation.  But no teacher in the world ever made it so
plain that God can be satisfied with nothing that any other can do for
us--with nothing but actual likeness to Him in ourselves.  No teacher
ever made it so plain that what we are to desire is not to be let off
punishment, but to be actually freed from sin.  He left no room for
doubt that only by following His steps, even to the cross and surrender
of our lives, can we share His fellowship.  The very life which is
offered in sacrifice to lay the foundation of the new covenant is a
life or spirit which we are to share.  We are to eat and drink His
sacrificed flesh and blood--the blood which is the life--and so to be
one with Him and He with us.  He sacrificed Himself, in other words, in
order to make possible, through His life and Spirit, a new covenanted
society, in which men should have perfect fellowship with God and with
one another.  He did not reject the idea of a propitiation won for man
by His vicarious sacrifice--the truth is far from that--but He keeps it
in inseparable connexion with the life which is to be based upon it;
and in the eucharist He brought back the idea of sacrifice to what had
been its starting-point in all primitive usages.  'The one point,' says
{148} Professor Robertson-Smith, 'that comes out clear and strong (from
the examination of ancient sacrificial customs), is that the
fundamental idea of ancient sacrifice is sacramental communion, and
that all atoning rites are ultimately to be regarded as owing their
efficacy to a communication of divine life to the worshipper, and to
the establishment or confirmation of a living bond between them and
their God[21].'

Still Christ's sacrifice of propitiation, to which we contribute
nothing, in which we do not share, remains a necessary prelude to the
establishment of the new life.  It is in virtue of this that we are
justified and accepted and allowed to start afresh.  This fact the New
Testament in general takes for granted, and offers no explanation of
it; as indeed the human heart has in general accepted the benefit in
all thankfulness and asked no questions.  But the speculative modern
intellect has found a difficulty in the matter--in the matter at least
as commonly represented--and we have noticed that a suggestion of
explanation is made by St. Paul in this passage.  God had long gone on
'passing over' sin all over the world in loving forbearance, bearing
with all men's sinfulness, {149} till they had thoroughly learnt the
lesson of their own need of God and inability to save themselves.  But
this very forbearance rendered God's character liable to complete
misunderstanding.  He might have been supposed to be kind indeed, but
indifferent to sin.  'These things hast thou done and I kept silence:
thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself[22].'
Thus the severity manifested in the claim of the 'righteous Father'
upon the Son of Man, His claim of an obedience unto the shedding of His
blood, and the ready response to His claim on the part of the Son of
Man gladly rendering up His life in homage to the Father--these taken
together, the claim of the Father and the sacrifice of the Son,
vindicated within the area of the Christian faith the true character of
God, and forced the believer in Jesus to hold the severity and the love
in their inseparable unity as making up the divine righteousness.

Does not this thought open at least an intelligible vista into the
mystery of the Atonement?  Christ is the Son of Man.  He is to
inaugurate the true manhood.  But first He must deal with the manhood
that has gone {150} astray, and make an act of reparation to the Father
for all the outrage that our sins have done Him.  Thus in contrast to
all our self-pleasing, self-indulgence, self-excusing, in contrast to
all our clamorous insolence towards God and indifference to His laws,
we behold the Son of Man recognizing the Father's strict requirements,
and lifting before His eyes, in the name of the manhood which He
represents, the great reparation of an unshrinking obedience and
loyalty unto death.  The Father spared not His only Son the natural
consequences of obedience in a world of sin.  The Son spared not
Himself, but shed His blood--the 'blood which is the life'--at the
Father's will.  This is the one full, perfect, and sufficient
sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world.
It is the sacrifice offered in the power of nothing less than 'eternal
spirit.'  Henceforth, then, no man can come to God in faith in Jesus,
in the faith which even at its root is moral allegiance, and think
lightly either of God's holiness or of his own or others' sin.  God
forgives him his sin, but it cost Him much to forgive it.  The Cross is
the measure of the antipathy between God and sin.

And it is well to notice how the great {151} thought of this passage is
made intelligible to the ordinary English reader again, only by the
Revised Version.  In the old Bible the word signifying 'passing over'
of sins is translated 'remission'--the very thing with which it is in
fact contrasted.  It is not an exaggeration to say that, in this and
very many places of the epistles, the Revised Version for the first
time renders the thought of the apostles again intelligible to the
English reader.  And if the Revised Version is not popular, as the
booksellers tell us it is not, this is, I fear, only a sign that the
majority of English Christians do not really care to _understand_ the
meaning of the message with which, as a matter of words, they are so
familiar.


iii.

The metaphor of 'redemption' and the metaphor of 'propitiation'
complete and check one another.  As in the parables it is only the
exact point of comparison between the earthly and the heavenly which
can be pressed for the spiritual lesson, so it is with these
metaphorical words, which are in fact parables compressed.  The word
'redemption' is meant to suggest a price paid by God, or by Christ, for
our being {152} made free; it is the price of the Son's death.  He
'gives His life a ransom for many.'  The word 'propitiation' again is
meant to suggest that the offering of the life in sacrifice was the
means to win for us forgiveness from God.  So far, both metaphorical
words have their clear and harmonious meaning.  But in old days the
metaphor of redemption was worked out by Origen and others beyond the
exact point of the original suggestion.  The price, they argued, must
have been paid to the enemy who held us captive; i.e. Christ's life was
offered as a price to the devil in order that his claim might be
satisfied and we might be justly set free.  But this extension of the
scope of the metaphor is wholly alien to the New Testament.  On the
other hand, the idea of propitiation has suggested at many periods the
horrible notion that the Son wrung from the angry Father the pardon
which He was unwilling to give.  Such a notion is again wholly alien to
the New Testament.  But in fact the two metaphors are mutually
corrective; and each tends to exclude the misuse of the other.  The
idea that Christ offered anything to the devil is corrected by the
notion inherent in the phrase 'propitiation (of the Father).'  What the
Son offered was a sacrifice {153} directed to the Father only.  On the
other hand, the idea that the mind of the Father needed to be changed
towards us, is corrected by the suggestion inherent in the other
metaphor of redemption; for it is He who, because He loved us, gave up
His own Son to buy us out of the slavery of sin.  Each metaphor
suggests a single idea--each complementary of the other, and corrective
of its misuse--and both combine to tell us of the one inseparable love
of the Father and the Son, uniting in a sacrificial act which is
ascribed to both, to redeem us from the tyranny of sin and to set the
pardoning love free to work upon us, without obscuring the true
hatefulness of sin or the true character of God.


If, especially recently, the doctrine of the atonement[23] has involved
intellectual difficulty, on the other hand it has proved itself, as the
popular Christian literature of all ages sufficiently shows, widely and
deeply welcome to the human heart.  This wide welcome which it has
received shows that it contains a deep truth.  And from this point of
view, from the point of view of our practical spiritual needs, we do
well to meditate {154} much and deeply upon this doctrine.  We can
depend upon it, that if we are to go on patiently doing good in a world
like this, so full of disappointments and anxieties and moral failures
and torturing scruples, we must have peace at the heart.  And this is
what the really evangelical doctrine is capable of giving us.  It bids
us continually look out of ourselves up to God, and assures us that His
love, manifested in the sacrifice of His Son, is there continually,
unchangeably.  It is there, waiting till first we turn to Him, to give
us the assurance of entire absolution and admission into the divine
fellowship, wholly irrespective of what we have been or done; and it is
there continually, however often we fall, with the same large and
liberal hand to pour out continual forgivenesses, and never wearies of
restoring us again and again to the solid foundation of the peace and
grace which are by Jesus Christ.  We are not meant to be miserably
anxious or morbidly introspective.  We must confess our sins, and that
with exactness, without self-sparing, without self-excusing, in utter
humility and truth; but 'if we confess our sins, he is faithful and
just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all
unrighteousness.'



[1] Jer. xiii. 33.

[2] Except the sins which slew Him.

[3] I have combined this passage with the illustrative passages in St.
Paul's speeches to the heathen.  Acts xiv. 16: 'Who in the generations
gone by suffered all the nations to walk in their own ways.'  Acts
xvii. 30: 'The times of ignorance God overlooked (winked at); but now
he commandeth men that they should all everywhere repent.'  Wisd. xl.
23: 'Thou overlookest (winkest at) the sins of men to the end they may
repent.'

[4] This paragraph gives distinctness to a somewhat latent thought in
vers. 25, 26.  But I feel convinced that this, and nothing else, is the
thought.

[5] Verses 5, 25, 26.

[6] Rom. iii. 22.

[7] Phil. iii. 9.

[8] 2 Cor. v. 21.

[9] Rom. ix.  31.

[10] Rom. ii. 5.

[11] Cf. 1 John i. 9: 'Faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins.'

[12] Joseph, the 'righteous' man in Matt. i. 19, is kindly.  But his
kindliness has still the elements of moral severity.  And it must be
remembered that in Rom. v. 7 'righteous' is still put in contrast to
'good.'

[13] See Acts ii. 38: 'Be baptized ... unto the remission of your
sins.'  xxii. 16: 'Be baptized and wash away thy sins.'

[14] Acts xxvi. 18, i.e. forgiveness and fellowship in the consecrated
body, the new Israel; cf. xx. 33.

[15] 2 Macc. vii. 37.

[16] 4 Macc. vi. 28, 29.

[17] John xi. 50.

[18] None the less immoral as Caiaphas intended it, because, as St.
John perceives, a divine truth uttered itself through his lips (John
xi. 51).

[19] John i. 29.

[20] Matt. xxvi. 28; Luke xxii. 19; 1 Cor. xi. 24.

[21] Robertson-Smith, _Religion of the Semites_ (Black, 1889), p. 418.

[22] Ps. l. 21; cf. Eccles. viii. 11.

[23] On some of the difficulties felt about the doctrine of the
Atonement, see app. note D.




{155}

DIVISION II.  § 2.  CHAPTER IV.

_The true seed of Abraham._

St. Paul has been repudiating the principle of justification by works
of the law.  To those with whom he had been brought up, this was in the
highest degree to dishonour the Jewish law, and indeed the principle of
divinely-given law at all.  But in the last words of the previous
chapter he refuses to admit this inference.  'God forbid that we should
make law of none effect.  Nay, we establish law.'

This idea of the Gospel, rightly understood, establishing the law even
while it superseded it, is with St. Paul a very favourite one, and he
elaborates it in different ways.  Sometimes he shows how the function
of the written law, or 'the letter,' is only to awaken the conscience
and make men know their sinfulness.  It can give men no help in
corresponding to the moral requirement which it expresses.  Having
{156} convicted the conscience of sin, it has done its work, and must
yield its place to a more effective spiritual agency.  The letter
killeth, in order that the Spirit may give life to those whom it has
killed.  And, on the other hand, the one object of this new spiritual
agency, this life-giving Spirit, is to infuse the power of moral
obedience, which the law could not give, into men's lives, 'that the
requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk after the
Spirit.'  In this place, however, St. Paul only alludes to this
argument and in the main adopts another.  He shows from the Book of the
Law, that the father of the faithful, himself the typical instance of a
justified man, was justified, not by works which he had done, but
simply because he believed; not upon the basis of any law or covenant,
but as a man simply and not as a circumcised man; and again, that
David, the man after God's own heart, living under the law, would have
us rest our hopes of blessedness, not on our merits as having kept the
law, but simply on the forgiving bounty of divine grace.

Let us inquire, he says, into the case of Abraham, whom we Jews are
proud to own for our national ancestor.  What are we to say of him?  If
Abraham approached God in virtue {157} of his merits in having kept a
law, and so was accepted by God because of what he had done of himself,
there is something for him to boast of.  But this in fact is not his
relation to God according to the scripture at all.  There--

        'merit lives from man to man,
  But not from man, O Lord, to thee.'

The whole initiation is God's.  He simply makes a promise of His own
pure goodwill--'Thy seed shall be as the stars of heaven'--and Abraham
simply believed Him; and this, and nothing but this, was 'counted to
him for righteousness[1].'  The two suggested relations of Abraham to
God are broadly contrasted and can be generally applied.  In the one
case you have a compact between God who imposes, and man who accepts,
an allotted task with a payment attached to its fulfilment.  If the man
fulfils it, his payment can be classed as due to him under the compact.
In the other case you have nothing done, no claim alleged, but a pure
act of God, accepting one of our sinful race, as he is, simply because
he takes God at His word.  And this is how David also views our
relation to God.  You find him[2] opening his mouth to tell {158} us
what sort of man is truly blessed, truly to be congratulated.  And he
thinks not of one who claims a reward because of his merit, but of one
who has found no comfort or resource except in penitent confession of
his sins, and whose sins God has forgiven and has consented to treat as
if they did not exist.  It is the unmerited act of the divine bounty,
it is God justifying the sinful, which is the source of blessedness
(vers. 1-8).

Now we go back to the case of Abraham to inquire whether the blessing
of divine acceptance was pronounced upon him because he was the head of
the chosen race marked out by circumcision--which was, so to speak, the
first part of the law.  No, it was before he was circumcised.  The
token of circumcision came afterwards[3], as the seal or external
confirmation of what he had already received simply as a believing man;
so that he might have for his true sons believers, whether
uncircumcised or circumcised, and they might share his acceptance
simply by believing God as he believed Him (vers. 9-12).

Plainly when God made Abraham the promise that he should be the heir of
the world[4], no law {159} was introduced into the relationship.  It
was purely a matter of God promising and Abraham taking God at His
word.  Indeed it could not have been otherwise.  Introduce law, and you
introduce a compact between God and man which annuls the relationship
of God simply promising and man simply believing--a compact which
throws a strain on man's independent powers, which they are not able to
bear.  The one inevitable result of the law is to put man in the
position, in which apart from law he cannot find himself, of a
defaulter who knows himself, as a defaulter, under the divine wrath.
The true relationship leaves matters in the hands of God, who purely
promises of His good favour--man simply in faith receiving (vers.
13-16a).  This resting everything on God's promise and man's faith
gives security for the fulfilment of the promise to 'all the seed.'
And the 'seed to whom the promise was made' includes, not only the race
chosen later to receive the law, but believers of all races; Abraham
being in this sense 'a father of many nations,' as he stands under the
eyes of God whom he believed in--God who had power to make His promise
good, even by recalling to life again the dead faculties of Abraham's
old age, and summoning children {160} which did not yet exist as if
they were already there.  Here is the point: Abraham believed that God
had the power to be as good as His word, in spite of all obvious
reasons to the contrary.  Therefore he looked the facts steadily in the
face--his own and Sarah's great age.  But he did not suffer this to
weigh in the balance against God's promise.  He made quite sure that
God would do as He promised, and glorified God by this strong act of
faith.  This it is that was reckoned to him for righteousness, i.e.
this it is that enabled God to accept him as righteous without any
consideration of deeds done.  And the record of this acceptance is made
for our sakes to-day.  God is still taking men into the number of the
righteous, and He still does it on the same principle.  He will reckon
us for righteous if we will take Him at His word, and believe in His
power to do as He has promised.  And in our case He has given us fresh
ground for such confident belief; for Jesus, on whom as Lord our hopes
rest and who died to make atonement for our sins, He has by His power
raised up from the dead, that by faith in Him, dead and yet alive
again, we might be taken like Abraham without more ado into the number
of the righteous.

{161}

What then shall we say[5] that Abraham, our forefather according to the
flesh, hath found?  For if Abraham was justified by works, he hath
whereof to glory; but not toward God.  For what saith the scripture?
And Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned unto him for
righteousness.  Now to him that worketh, the reward is not reckoned as
of grace, but as of debt.  But to him that worketh not, but believeth
on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is reckoned for
righteousness.  Even as David also pronounceth blessing upon the man,
unto whom God reckoneth righteousness apart from works, _saying_,

  Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven,
  And whose sins are covered.
  Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not reckon sin.

Is this blessing then pronounced upon the circumcision, or upon the
uncircumcision also? for we say, To Abraham his faith was reckoned for
righteousness.  How then was it reckoned? when he was in circumcision,
or in uncircumcision?  Not in circumcision, but in uncircumcision: and
he received the sign of circumcision, a seal of the righteousness of
the faith which he had while he was in uncircumcision: that he might be
the father of all them that believe, though they be in uncircumcision,
that righteousness m

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/32673