_JEWISH RESPONSIBILITY AND GUILT_
ROMANS ii. 17-29
"_The Jew, first, and also the Greek_"; this has been the burthen of
the Apostle's thought thus far upon the whole. He has had the Jew for
some while in his chief thought, but he has recurred again and again
in passing to the Gentile. Now he faces the Pharisee explicitly and on
open ground, before he passes from this long exposure of human sin to
the revelation of the glorious Remedy.
[Sidenote: Ver. 17.] =But if[20] you,= you emphatically, the reader or
hearer now in view, you who perhaps have excused yourself from
considering your own case by this last mention of the responsibility
of the non-Jewish world; =if you bear the name of Jew,= whether or no
you possess the corresponding spiritual reality; =and repose yourself
upon the Law,= as if the possession of that awful revelation of duty
was your protection, not your sentence; =and glory in God,= as if He
were your private property, the decoration of your national position,
whereas the knowledge of Him is given you in trust for the world;
[Sidenote: Ver. 18.] =and know the Will,= His Will, _the_ Will supreme;
=and put the touchstone to things which differ,= like a casuist skilled
in moral problems; =schooled out of the Law,= under continuous training
(so the Greek present participle bids us explain) by principles and
precepts which the Law supplies;--[Sidenote: Ver. 19.] =(if) you are
sure that you, yourself,= whoever else, =are a leader of blind men, a
light of those who are in the dark,= [Sidenote: Ver. 20.] =an educator
of the thoughtless, a teacher of beginners, possessing, in the Law,
the outline,[21]= the system, =of real knowledge and truth,[22]= (the
outline indeed, but not the power and life related to it):--if this is
your estimate of your position and capacities, I turn it upon
yourself. Think, and answer--[Sidenote: Ver. 21.] =You therefore, your
neighbour's teacher, do you not teach yourself? You, who proclaim,
Thou shalt not steal, do you steal?= [Sidenote: Ver. 22.] =You, who
say, Thou shalt not commit adultery, do you commit it? You, who
abominate the idols,= affecting to loathe their very neighbourhood,
=do you plunder temples,= entering the polluted precincts readily
enough for purposes at least equally polluting? [Sidenote: Ver. 23.]
=You who glory in the Law,= as the palladium of your race, =do you, by
your violation of the Law, disgrace your[23] God?= [Sidenote: Ver. 24.]
="For the name of our God is, because of you, railed at among the
heathen," as it stands written,= in Ezekiel's message (xxxvi. 20) to
the ungodly Israel of the ancient Dispersion--a message true of the
Dispersion of the later day.
We need not overstrain the emphasis of the Apostle's stern invective.
Not every non-Christian Jew of the first century, certainly, was an
adulterer, a thief, a plunderer. When a few years later (Acts
xxviii. 17) St Paul gathered round him the Jews of Rome, and spent a
long day in discussing the prophecies with them, he appealed to them
with a noble frankness which in some sense evidently expected a
response in kind. But it is certain that the Jews of the Roman
Dispersion bore a poor general character for truth and honour. And
anywise St Paul knew well that there is a deeply natural connexion
between unhallowed religious bigotry and that innermost failure of
self-control which leaves man only too open to the worst temptations.
Whatever feeds gross personal pride promotes a swift and deadly decay
of moral fibre. Did this man pride himself on Abraham's blood, and his
own Rabbinic lore and skill, and scorn both the Gentile "sinner" and
the _'am-hââretz_, "the people of the land," the rank and file of his
own race? Then he was the very man to be led helpless by the Tempter.
As a fact, there are maxims of the later Rabbinism, which represent
beyond reasonable doubt the spirit if not the letter of the worst
watchwords of "the circumcision" of St Paul's time: "Circumcision is
equivalent to all the commandments of the Law"; "To live in Palestine
is equal to the Commandments"; "He that hath his abode in Palestine is
sure of life eternal."[24] The man who could even for an hour
entertain such a creed was ready (however deep below his consciousness
the readiness lay) for anything--under fitting circumstances of
temptation.
So it is now, very far beyond the limits of the Jewish Dispersion of
our time. Now as then, and for the Christian "outwardly" as for the
Jew "outwardly," there is no surer path to spiritual degeneracy than
spiritual pride. What are the watchwords which have succeeded to those
of the Rabbinists who encountered St Paul? Are they words, or
thoughts, of self-applause because of the historic orthodoxy of your
creed? Because of the Scriptural purity of your theory of salvation?
Because of the illustrious annals of your national Church, older than
the nation which it has so largely welded and developed? Because of
the patient courage, under contempt and exclusion, of the community
which some call your denomination, your sect, but which is to you
indeed your Church? Because of your loyalty to order? Because of your
loyalty to liberty? Take heed. The best, corrupted, becomes inevitably
the worst. In religion, there is only one altogether safe "glorying."
It is when the man can say from the soul, with open eyes, and
therefore with a deeply humbled heart, "God forbid that I should
glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, whereby the world
is crucified unto me, and I unto the world" (Gal. vi. 14). All other
"glorying is not good." Be thankful for every genuine privilege. But
for Christ's sake, and for your own soul's sake, do not, even in the
inmost secret of your soul, "value _yourself_" upon them. It is
disease, it is disaster, to do so.
And shall not we of the Christian Dispersion take home also what
Ezekiel and St Paul say about the blasphemies, the miserable railings
at our God, caused by the sins of those who bear His Name? Who does
not know that, in every region of heathendom, the missionary's plea
for Christ is always best listened to where the pagan, or the
Mussulman, has _not_ before his eyes the Christianity of
"treaty-ports," and other places where European life is to be seen
lived without restraint? The stumbling-block may be the drunken
sailor, or the unchaste merchant, or civilian, or soldier, or
traveller. Or it may be just the man who, belonging to a race reputed
Christian, merely ignores the Christian's holy Book, and Day, and
House, and avoids all semblance of fellowship with his countrymen who
have come to live beside him that they may preach Christ where He is
not known. Or it may be the government, reputed Christian, which,
amidst all its noble benefits to the vast races it holds in sway,
allows them to know, to think, at least to suspect, that there are
cases where it cares more for revenue than for righteousness. In all
these cases the Christian Dispersion gives occasion for railing at the
Christian's God: and the reckoning will be a grave matter "in that
Day."
But shall the Christians of the Christendom at home stand exempt from
the charge? Ah let us who name the blessed Name with even the least
emphasis of faith and loyalty, dwelling amongst the masses who only
passively, so to speak, are Christian, who "profess nothing," though
they are, or are supposed to be, baptized--let us, amidst "the world"
which understands not a little of what we ought to be, and watches us
so keenly, and so legitimately--let us take home this message, sent
first to the old inconsistent Israel. Do we, professing godliness,
shew the mind of Christ in our secular intercourse? Do we, on the
whole, give the average "world" cause to expect that "a Christian," as
such, is a man to trust in business, in friendship? Is the conviction
quietly forced upon them that a Christian's temper, and tongue, are
not as other men's? That the Christian minister habitually lives high
above self-seeking? That the Christian tradesman faithfully remembers
his customers' just interests, and is true in all his dealings? That
the Christian servant, and the Christian master, are alike
exceptionally mindful of each other's rights, and facile about their
own? That the Christian's time, and his money, are to a remarkable
degree applied to the good of others, for Christ's sake? This is what
the members of the Christian Society, in the inner sense of the word
Christian, are expected to be in what we all understand by "the
world." If they are so, God be thanked. If they are not so--who shall
weigh the guilt? Who shall adequately estimate the dishonour so done
to the blessed Name? And "the Day" is coming.
But he has more to say about the position of the Jew. He would not
even seem to forget the greatness of the God-given privilege of
Israel; and he will use that privilege once more as a cry to
conscience.
[Sidenote: Ver. 25.] =For circumcision indeed profits you, if you
carry law into practice;= in that case circumcision is for you God's
seal upon God's own promises to the true sons of Abraham's blood _and
faith_. Are you indeed a practiser of the holy Code whose summary and
essence is love to God and love to man? Can you look your Lord in the
face and say--not, "I have satisfied all Thy demands; pay me that Thou
owest," but, "Thou knowest that I love Thee, and therefore oh how I
love Thy law"? Then you are indeed a child of the covenant, through
His grace; and the seal of the covenant speaks to you the certainties
of its blessing. =But if you are a transgressor of law, your circumcision
is turned uncircumcision;= the divine seal is to you nothing, for you
are not the rightful holder of the deed of covenant which it seals.
[Sidenote: Ver. 26.] =If therefore the uncircumcision,= the Gentile
world, in some individual instance, =carefully keeps the ordinances of
the Law,= reverently remembers the love owed to God and to man, =shall
not his uncircumcision,= the uncircumcision of the man supposed, =be
counted as if circumcision?= Shall he not be treated as a lawful
recipient of covenant blessings even though _the seal_ upon the
document of promise is, not at all by his fault, missing?
[Sidenote: Ver. 27.] =And= thus =shall not this hereditary (ἐκ φύσεως)
uncircumcision,= this Gentile born and bred, =fulfilling the
law= of love and duty, =judge you, who by means of letter and
circumcision are--law's transgressor,= using as you practically do use
the terms, the letter, of the covenant, and the rite which is its
seal, as means to violate its inmost import, and claiming, in the
pride of privilege, blessings promised only to self-forgetting love?
[Sidenote: Ver. 28.] =For not the (Jew) in the visible= sphere =is a
Jew; nor is circumcision in the visible= sphere, =in the flesh,
circumcision.= [Sidenote: Ver. 29.] =No, but the Jew in the hidden=
sphere; =and circumcision of heart, in Spirit, not letter;=
circumcision in the sense of a work on the soul, wrought by God's
Spirit, not in that of a legal claim supposed to rest upon a routine
of prescribed observances. =His praise,= the praise of such a Jew, the
Jew in this hidden sense, thus circumcised in heart, =does not come
from men, but does come from God.= Men may, and very likely will, give
him anything but praise; they will not like him the better for his
deep divergence from their standard, and from their spirit. But the
Lord knows him, and loves him, and prepares for him His own welcome;
"Well done, good and faithful."
Here is a passage far-reaching, like the paragraphs which have gone
before it. Its immediate bearing needs only brief comment, certainly
brief explanation. We need do little more than wonder at the moral
miracle of words like these written by one who, a few years before,
was spending the whole energy of his mighty will upon the defence of
ultra-Judaism. The miracle resides not only in the vastness of the
man's change of view, but in the manner of it. It is not only that he
denounces Pharisaism, but he denounces it in a tone entirely free from
its spirit, which he might easily have carried into the opposite camp.
What he meets it with is the assertion of truths as pure and peaceable
as they are eternal; the truths of the supreme and ultimate importance
of the right attitude of man's heart towards God, and of the
inexorable connexion between such an attitude and a life of unselfish
love towards man. Here is one great instance of that large spiritual
phenomenon, the transfiguration of the first followers of the Lord
Jesus from what they had been to what under His risen power they
became. We see in them men whose convictions and hopes have undergone
an incalculable revolution; yet it is a revolution which disorders
nothing. Rather, it has taken fanaticism for ever out of their
thoughts and purposes. It has softened their whole souls towards man,
as well as drawn them into an unimagined intimacy with God. It has
taught them to live above the world; yet it has brought them into the
most practical and affectionate relations with every claim upon them
in the world around them. "Your life is hid with Christ in God";
"Honour all men"; "He that loveth not, knoweth not God."
But the significance of this particular passage is indeed
far-reaching, permanent, universal. As before, so here, the Apostle
warns us (not only the Jew of that distant day) against the fatal but
easy error of perverting privilege into pride, forgetting that every
gift of God is "a talent" with which the man is to trade for his Lord,
and for his Lord alone. But also, more explicitly here, he warns us
against that subtle tendency of man's heart to substitute, in
religion, the outward for the inward, the mechanical for the
spiritual, the symbol for the thing. Who can read this passage without
reflections on the privileges, and on the seals of membership, of the
Christian Church? Who may not take from it a warning not to put in the
wrong place the sacred gifts, as sacred as they can be, because
divine, of Order, and of Sacrament? Here is a great Hebrew doctor
dealing with that primary Sacrament of the Elder Church of which such
high and urgent things are said in the Hebrew Scriptures; a rite of
which even medieval theologians have asserted that it was the
Sacrament of the same grace as that which is the grace of Baptism
now.[25] But when he has to consider the case of one who has received
the physical ordinance apart from the right attitude of soul, he
speaks of the ordinance in terms which a hasty reader might think
slighting. He does not slight it. He says it "profits," and he is
going soon to say more to that purpose. For him it is nothing less
than God's own Seal on God's own Word, assuring the individual, as
with a literal touch divine, that all is true _for him_, as he claims
grace in humble faith. But then he contemplates the case of one who,
by no contempt but by force of circumstance, has never received the
holy seal, yet believes, and loves, and obeys. And he lays it down
that the Lord of the Covenant will honour that man's humble claim as
surely as if he brought the covenant-document ready sealed in his
hand. Not that even for him the seal, if it may be had, will be
nothing; it will assuredly be divine still, and will be sought as
God's own gift, His seal ex _post facto_. But the principle remains
that the ritual seal and the spiritual reality are separable; and that
the greater thing, the thing of absolute and ultimate necessity
between the soul and God, is the spiritual reality; and that where
that is present there God accepts.
It was the temptation of Israel of old to put Circumcision in the
place of faith, love, and holiness, instead of in its right place, as
the divine imperial seal upon the covenant of grace, the covenant to
be claimed and used by faith. It is the temptation of some Christians
now to put the sacred order of the Church, and particularly its divine
Sacraments, the holy Bath and the holy Meal, in the place of spiritual
regeneration, and spiritual communion, rather than in their right
place as divine imperial seals on the covenant which guarantees both
to faith. For us, as for our elder brethren, this paragraph of the
great argument is therefore altogether to the purpose. "Faith is
greater than water," says even Peter Lombard,[26] the _Magister_ of
the medieval Schools. So it is. And the thought is in perfect unison
with St Paul's principle of reasoning here. Let it be ours to
reverence, to prize, to use the ordinances of our Master, with a
devotion such as we might seem sure we should feel if we saw Him dip
His hand in the Font, or stretch it out to break the Bread, and hallow
it, and give it, at the Table. But let us be quite certain, for our
own souls' warning, that it is true all the while--in the sense of
this passage--that "he is not a Christian which is one outwardly,
neither is that Baptism, or Communion, which is outward; but he is a
Christian which is one inwardly, and Baptism and Communion are those
of the heart, in the Spirit, not in the letter."
Sacred indeed are the God-given externals of Christian order and
ordinance. But there are degrees of greatness in the world of sacred
things. And the moral work of God direct upon the soul of man is
greater than His sacramental work done through man's body.
[20] There is no practical doubt that εἰ δὲ not ἴde ("_Behold_")
is the right reading here.
[21] Μόρφωσις: we need not understand by this word a reference to
_mere formalism_. Μορφή on the contrary regularly means shape
expressive of underlying substance. And μόρφωσις means not shape
but shap_ing_. He means that the Pharisee really _has_, in the Law,
God's formed and formative model of knowledge and reality. Still,
2 Tim. iii. 5 justifies our also seeing here a side suggestion of the
possibility of dissociating even the divine model from the
corresponding "power."
[22] Τῦς γνώσεως, τῦς ἀληθείας:--the adjective "_real_" in our
rendering represents the Greek definite article, though with a slight
exaggeration.
[23] Τὸν Θεόν. We represent the definite article here by "_your_,"
and just below by "_our_"; not without hesitation, as it somewhat
exaggerates the definition.
[24] See A. M'Caul's _Old Paths_ (נתיבות עולם), p. 230, etc.
[25] So Bernard, _Sermo in Cœnâ_, c. 2.
[26] See _Sententiæ_, iv., iv., 3-7.