Produced by Al Haines
_St. Paul's_
_Epistle to the Romans_
_A Practical Exposition_
BY CHARLES GORE, M.A., D.D.
OF THE COMMUNITY OF THE RESURRECTION
CANON OF WESTMINSTER; CHAPLAIN TO THE KING
VOL. II
(CHAPTERS IX-XVI)
NEW IMPRESSION
LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET
1901
OXFORD
HORACE HART, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY
{v}
PREFACE
There would be no need for a preface to this second volume were it not
that a very kindly and careful review of the first volume in _The
Guardian_ of May 24 last, requires a word of notice. The reviewer
warns me off 'the dialogue system of exegesis.' Now no doubt this
principle, like every other, may be abused. 'The Jewish objector' may,
as the reviewer complains, be allowed to 'run riot.' Still I cannot
doubt that the Jewish objector is a reality of an illuminative kind in
the argument of such passages as Romans iii. 1-8, or the great passage
(ix-xi), to which the first part of this volume is devoted. Of the
other points of detail noticed by the reviewer--which a volume of this
kind is not the place to discuss--many are confessedly doubtful, and
some unimportant. On most of {vi} them I am still disposed to retain
my former opinion, but I would, in accordance with my critic's wishes,
alter 'the actual life' (vol. i. p. 203) into 'the principle of life,'
and (p. 213) instead of saying that the principle of living by dying
'belongs only to a fallen world' say that 'it belongs, _as St. Paul
views it, though probably not in its ultimate law_, to a fallen world.'
I agree that in its deepest sense the principle appears to be an
ultimate law of all created life of which the conditions are known to
us.
C. G.
WESTMINSTER ABBEY,
_Conversion of St. Paul_, 1900.
{vii}
TABLE OF CONTENTS
THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS.
PAGE
DIVISION IV _The theodicy or justification of God for His
dealings with the Jews_ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
CHAPTER
IX. 1-13 Sec. 1 The present rejection of Israelites no
breach of a divine promise . . . . . . . . . . 14
14-29 Sec. 2 God's liberty in showing mercy and judgement
always retained and asserted . . . . . . . . . 31
30-x.21 Sec. 3 Lack of faith the reason of Israel's rejection 44
XI. 1-12 Sec. 4 God's judgement on Israel neither universal
nor final . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
13-36 Sec. 5 God's present purpose for the Jews through
the Gentiles: and so for all humanity . . . . . 68
DIVISION V _Practical exhortation_ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
XII. 1-2 Sec. 1 Self-surrender in response to God . . . . . . . 97
3-21 Sec. 2 The community spirit . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
XIII. 1-7 Sec. 3 The Christians and the imperial power . . . . . 116
8-10 Sec. 4 The summary debt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
11-14 Sec. 5 The approach of the day . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
XIV. 1-23 Sec. 6 Mutual toleration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
XV. 1-13 Sec. 7 Unselfish forbearance and inclusiveness . . . . 159
{viii}
DIVISION VI _Conclusion_ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
XV. 4-33 Sec. 1 St. Paul's excuse for writing, and his hope
of coming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
XVI. 1-2 Sec. 2 A commendation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
3-16 Sec. 3 Personal greetings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
17-20 Sec. 4 Final warning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198
21-23 Sec. 5 Salutations from companions . . . . . . . . . . 200
25-27 Sec. 6 Final doxology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201
APPENDED NOTES:--
A. The meanings of the word 'faith' . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205
B. The use of the word 'conscience' . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
C. Recent reactions from the teaching about hell . . . . . . . 210
D. Difficulties about the doctrine of the atonement . . . . . . 215
E. Evolution and the Christian doctrine of the Fall . . . . . . 219
F. Baptism by immersion and by affusion . . . . . . . . . . . . 237
G. A prayer of Jeremy Taylor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238
H. The origin of the maxim 'In necessariis unitas, &c.' . . . . 239
I. St. Augustine's teaching that 'The Church is the
body of Christ offered in the eucharist' . . . . . . . . 240
{1}
THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS
DIVISION IV. CHAPTERS IX-XI.
_The theodicy or justification of God for His dealings with the Jews._
St. Paul has concluded his great exposition of the meaning of 'the
gospel': that in it is the disclosure of a divine righteousness into
which all mankind--Jews and Gentiles on the same level of need and
sin--are to be freely admitted by simply believing in Jesus. The
believer in Jesus first welcomes the absolute and unmerited forgiveness
of his sins, which his redeemer has won for him, and thus acquitted
passes into the spiritual strength and joy and fellowship of the new
life, the life of the redeemed humanity, lived in Jesus Christ, the
second Adam or head of our race. The {2} contemplation of the present
moral freedom, and the glorious future prospect, of this catholic
body--the elect of God in Jesus Christ--has in the eighth chapter
filled the apostle's language with the glow of an enthusiasm almost
unparalleled in all the compass of his epistles. And he is intending
to pass on to interpret to the representatives of this church of Christ
at Rome some of the moral obligations which follow most clearly from
the consideration of what their faith really means. This ethical
division of the epistle begins with chapter xii. The interval (ix-xi)
is occupied with a discussion which is an episode, in the sense that
the epistle might be read without it and no feeling of a broken unity
would force itself upon us. None the less the discussion not only
confronts and silences an obvious objection to St. Paul's teaching, but
also brings out ideas about the meaning of the divine election, and the
responsibility involved in it, which are vital and necessary for the
true understanding of the 'free grace of God.' For these chapters
serve really to safeguard the all-important sense of our human
responsibility under the rich and unmerited conditions of divine
privilege in which we find ourselves.
{3}
St. Paul's argument so far has involved an obvious conclusion. God's
elect are no longer the Jews in particular. On the contrary, the Jews
in bulk have lost their position and become apostates in rejecting the
Christ. This result in the first place cuts St. Paul to the heart, for
his religious patriotism was peculiarly intense. But in the second
place it furnishes an objection in the mouth of the Jew against St.
Paul's whole message. For if God had really rejected His chosen
people, He had broken His word in so doing. God had pledged Himself to
Israel: the Old Testament scriptures were full of passages which might
be quoted to this effect. Thus--
'My mercy will I not utterly take from David
'Nor suffer my faithfulness to fail.
'My covenant will I not break,
'Nor alter the thing that is gone out of my lips.
'Once have I sworn by my holiness;
'I will not lie unto David;
'His seed shall endure for ever,
'And his throne as the sun before me.
'It shall be established for ever as the moon,
'And as the faithful witness in the sky[1].'
But according to St. Paul's teaching, had not God 'broken His
covenant'? What had {4} become of the 'faithful witness'? To this
objection, then, St. Paul sets himself to reply. The chapters we are
now to consider may be best represented as an animated defence of his
teaching directed toward a Jew who pleads this objection. St. Paul, no
doubt, had heard too much of it since he began to preach the gospel,
and had felt it too deeply in his own mind in the earlier days, when
the word of Jesus was as a goad against which he was kicking, for it to
be possible for him to pass it by. And his defence--his 'theodicy' or
justification of God--is in brief this: God never committed Himself or
tied Himself to Israel physically understood. He always kept hanging
over their heads declarations of His own freedom in choosing His
instruments, and warnings of possible rejection, such as ought to have
prevented their resting satisfied with merely having 'Abraham to their
father' (ix). And if the question be asked: Why has Israel been
rejected? The answer is: That so far as actual Israel has fallen out
of the elect body, it is because they refused to exhibit the
correspondence of faith (x); but also Israel, as such, has not been
rejected; for, as of old, so now there is a faithful remnant. Nor
again is the partial alienation of Israel which {5} has occurred final.
God is simply waiting for their recovery of faith, to restore them to
their ancient and inalienable position of election. Meanwhile He uses
their temporary alienation as the opportunity of the Gentiles, who in
their turn can only retain their newly won position by maintaining the
correspondence of faith with the purposes of God, and who also wait for
their fulfilment and the perfecting of their joy upon the recovery of
Israel as a body. Thus through all stages of election and
rejection--by both methods of mercy and of judgement--God, in His
inscrutable wisdom, works steadily for the opportunity of showing His
mercy upon all men.
When we have a brief analysis of the argument of these chapters under
our eyes, we may well rub them in astonishment, and look again, and ask
why, in the reaction against Calvinism[2], we had come (to put it
frankly) to dislike these chapters so much. We know that as a fact
these chapters have been taken as a stronghold of the Calvinistic
position by both its {6} friends and foes. They have come to
constitute in modern literature a sort of reproach upon
Christianity[3], just on the ground on which the best Christian
conscience of our time is most sensitive. Many of us would have to
admit that we have shrunk from these chapters as we have heard them
read, and probably avoided them in our own reading. We have shrunk
from the sound of the words--'the children being not yet born, neither
having done anything good or bad, that the purpose of God according to
election might stand, not of works but of him that calleth'--'Jacob
have I loved, and Esau have I hated'--'Whom he will he
hardeneth'--'Hath not the potter power over the clay.' Yet these
texts, with their arbitrary, unfair and narrow sound, appear as steps
in an argument which has for its conclusion the most universal
conception possible of the purpose of the divine love. 'God shut up
all unto disobedience, that he might have mercy upon all.' The
conclusion of the argument is so unmistakable, and so plain against any
Calvinistic attribution to God of {7} a narrow and arbitrary
favouritism, that there must have been some great mistake in our
understanding of its main point and drift. It is worth while then to
indicate at starting where the error has lain.
1. It has been in part owing to our mistaken habit of taking isolated
'texts' out of their connexion, as if they were detached aphorisms.
Now St. John, in his meditative method, does very generally round off a
fundamental Christian truth into an aphorism which really admits of
being detached and quoted apart from its context. And no doubt there
are in St. Paul detachable texts. But on the whole St. Paul, least of
all men, admits of being judged by detached fragments. His thought is
always in process. It looks before and after. He is seriously wronged
by the mere fact of his epistles being divided into separate verses,
and sometimes arbitrary chapters, as in the Authorized Version. Thus
in the case of these three chapters, the common mistake as to the
meaning of particular phrases could hardly have arisen if the argument
had been kept in mind as a whole, and especially its conclusion as to
the universal purpose of divine love--'to have mercy upon all.'
2. For, among other things, the true meaning {8} of 'election' in
these chapters would then have been apparent. St. Paul has been
popularly misunderstood to be referring to God's 'election' of some
individual men to salvation in heaven, and His abandonment of the rest
to hell. Whereas the argument as a whole and its conclusion make it
quite certain that what he is speaking of is the election of men in
nations or churches (only subordinately of individuals)[4] to a
position of special spiritual privilege and responsibility in this
world, such as the Jews had formerly occupied, and the Christians were
occupying now--an election to be the people of God, and bear His name
in the face of the world--the sort of election which carries with it a
great joy and a special opportunity, but not by any means a certainty
of final personal acceptableness to {9} God, apart from moral
faithfulness. Apart from such faithfulness the 'children of the
kingdom shall be cast into the outer darkness,' and the highest shall
be put lowest, while the lowest are raised highest.
3. Another cause of misunderstanding has been forgetfulness of the
point of view of the opponent with whom St. Paul is arguing. In modern
times assertions of divine absoluteness, like St. Paul's, have been
made by teachers who were refusing to recognize any such freedom of the
will in the individual human being--any such power to control his own
personal destiny--as seems to our common sense to be involved in moral
responsibility in any real sense. St. Paul has therefore been
supposed, like these more recent teachers, to be asserting divine
absoluteness, or the unrestricted freedom of divine choice, as against
human freedom, or in such a way as to destroy the idea of moral
responsibility. But in fact St. Paul is vindicating moral
responsibility. His opponent is the Jew, who holds that God had so
tied His hands and lost His liberty in choosing Israel once for all for
His elect people, that every child of Abraham can at all times claim
the privileges of his election for no other reason than because of his
{10} genealogy. Such a doctrine of election does indeed destroy all
real moral responsibility in the subject of it, and all freedom of
moral choice in God. St. Paul, on the other hand, asserts that God
remains free and absolute to elect and to reject, irrespective of all
questions of race, where He will and as He will. The absolute reason
of God's selections, the reason why certain races and individuals are
chosen for special privileges and as special instruments of the divine
purpose, lies in a region into which we cannot penetrate. But because
God has shown us His moral character and requirement, we can know how,
and how only, we may hope to retain any position which God has given
us; it is by exhibiting moral correspondence with His purpose--that is
faith--or malleability under His hand.
This is a doctrine then which lays upon 'the elect,' at any particular
moment, the moral responsibility of correspondence with a divine
purpose. In a word, St. Paul asserts divine sovereignty in such a
sense as vindicates instead of destroying moral responsibility, while
his opponent is claiming for Israel a sort of freedom from being
interfered with, which would really destroy their moral responsibility
altogether. {11} Thus, as has already been pointed out[5], nothing can
well be more important than to keep clearly in mind, here as elsewhere,
_with whom_ St. Paul is arguing.
4. It is worth while remarking, before we apply ourselves to St.
Paul's argument in detail, that it is essentially 'apologetic': it is a
justification of God in view of certain felt difficulties: and it is an
argument _ad hominem_, that is an argument with certain people on their
own assumptions, the sort of argument which takes the form of saying,
'you at least have no right on your own principles to urge such and
such difficulties.' Now we are bound to recognize how very important
at all periods this _ad hominem_ appeal is: how very important it is to
get men to see what their own principles really involve. A great part
of the evil of the world comes through people not thinking out what
they really mean and believe. But on the other hand, this sort of
argument, which proceeds upon a certain set of assumptions, has often a
merely temporary force, and carries with it an accompanying danger.
When the state of mind contemplated becomes a matter of history, the
argument based on its assumption has lost its power. In {12} view of a
quite different set of assumptions it may become even misleading. For
example, Bishop Butler argued for the truths of natural and revealed
religion, on the analogy of the facts of nature and on the assumption
of a divine author of nature, thus--If, as you admit, God made nature,
and yet nature is shown to contain such and such facts or processes,
how can you argue against the divine authorship of natural religion and
revelation on the ground that it attributes to God similar facts and
processes? This was a very effective argument so long as men did treat
the doctrine of God having created the world as a matter of course.
But when 'agnosticism' arose--when men ceased to discover in nature any
decisive argument for God or against God, and professed only an
inability to draw any conclusion at all, Butler's argument had lost its
force, and the difficulties in nature and religion to which he called
attention could even be used against ascribing a divine authorship to
either. Apologetic arguments are always liable to this peril. Thus
St. Paul's arguments, based on an unhesitating belief that the Old
Testament contained really the words of God, that what they asserted
about God was certainly true, and that God was certainly just {13} and
the standard of justice, may have an effect very contrary to his
intention when they are applied to people who feel no such certainties.
St. Paul may seem to be making the difficulties of believing in the
Bible only more obvious, by calling attention to its 'harsh and
unedifying' elements.
But this unfortunate result of most 'apologies' is, at least in the
case of St. Paul and Bishop Butler, only superficial. If the
apologetic argument is really deep, it retains, if not exactly its
original value, yet a value not the less real. Butler's indications of
the profound analogy which holds between the doctrines of religion and
the facts of nature, can never be out of place or lose force. Still
less can men ever cease to learn the deepest lessons from his temper of
mind and method. And that it is so with St. Paul's apology--that it
contains the profoundest and most abiding lessons about the
responsibility and danger of all elect bodies and individuals--will
appear plainly enough in what follows, now that we are in a position to
approach his argument in detail.
[1] Ps. lxxxix. 33-7.
[2] By this phrase is commonly meant the doctrine that God created some
men absolutely and irresistibly predestined to eternal life and joy,
and created the rest of mankind absolutely and hopelessly abandoned to
eternal misery.
[3] Matthew Arnold, _St. Paul and Protestantism_ (Smith, Elder, 1870),
p. 99, admits that St. Paul 'falls into Calvinism,' but patronizingly
excuses him on the ground that this Calvinism is with him secondary, or
even less than secondary.
[4] Of course the election of the nation or the church is felt,
especially in the New Testament, or whenever in the Old Testament
individuality is fully realized, to involve the election of each of the
persons composing the nation or the church. But still their election
is a challenge to their faith, and no guarantee of ultimate salvation.
St. Paul is left praying and suffering 'for the elect's sake that they
also may obtain the salvation ... with eternal glory' (2 Tim. ii. 10).
The elect have to 'make their calling and election sure' (2 Peter i.
10). It should, however, be noticed that election may be, and in the
Gospels is, used to describe the final selection of those who are
proved worthy of the 'marriage supper of the Lamb.' (Matt. xxii. 14.)
[5] Vol. i. pp. 114 f.
{14}
DIVISION IV. Sec. 1. CHAPTER IX. 1-13.
_The present rejection of Israelites no breach of a divine promise._
St. Paul has finished his glowing description of the position and
prospects of the elect people of God. And then, by contrast, the
misery of the outcast people once called elect--his own people--wrings
his heart with pain. The very idea that in his new enthusiasm for the
catholic church he can be supposed to be forgetting those who are of
his own flesh and blood, stirs him to a profound protest. He solemnly
asseverates that the pain which Israel's rejection causes him is acute
and continuous. He has caught himself at the point of praying to be
himself an outcast from Christ, if so be he could bring the people of
his own kindred and blood into the Church. For who indeed could seem
to have so good a title to be there? They are the Israelites--that is
God's own people: the eye of God was so specially upon this race {15}
that He redeemed it and made it His own son[1]: to them was vouchsafed
the shining of His continual presence in the tabernacle[2]: to them, in
the persons of the patriarchs and of Moses, God gave special covenants,
that is to say, pledged His word to them in an unmistakable manner and
repeatedly that He should be their God and they should be His people:
thus in pursuance of a divine purpose they were brought under the
education of the divinely given law and ritual worship: and all this
with direct and repeated promises of a more glorious position in the
future to be brought about by the divine king, the Christ who was to
be. To them finally belongs all the sanctity which can attach to a
people from having numbered among its members the holy ones of God: for
of this race were the patriarchs, the friends of God; and of this race,
so far as human birth is concerned, came in fact the Christ who, born a
Jew, is sovereign of the universe and ever blessed God. Surely then,
St. Paul implies, that this race, now that the Christ they were
expecting is at last come, now that the goal of all God's dealings with
them is at last reached, should have fallen outside the circle of His
people and be no longer sharers in {16} the sonship or the election,
would seem a result too monstrous to contemplate. The contrast between
what they were and were intended for, and what in present appearance
they are, is indeed appalling.
Yet the natural conclusion for the Jew to draw, which at this point
flashes into St. Paul's mind, the conclusion that God has proved
unfaithful, is not the true one. No: God's word, God's promise, has
not broken down. For, if the facts are looked at, it appears quite
plainly that the Israel of God was never simply the Israel of physical
descent, nor the children of Abraham simply his physical seed. Plainly
not. For Isaac and Ishmael were equally Abraham's seed, physically
considered, but for the purpose of God the promise is given only to the
family of the younger son, Isaac (Gen. xxi. 12), who moreover was born,
not in the mere natural order, but under circumstances of special
divine promise and intervention (Gen. xviii. 10). And if in this case
it be said that the younger son Isaac was the only son of Sarah, the
wife and free woman, and therefore had a natural prerogative over
Ishmael, yet the same inscrutable principle of selection is apparent in
the next generation, in a case where there is no possible inequality
{17} of natural claim--in the case of the two sons born simultaneously
to Isaac of the same mother. Prior to their birth, and prior therefore
to any possible merit or demerit on their own part--so that God's
absolute freedom of choice should appear quite conspicuously--the
younger Jacob was deliberately preferred over the elder Esau (Gen. xxv.
23). And in fact this race of Esau, this Edom--though they were
Israelites after the flesh--appear in history as something much worse
than merely secondary to the true Israel; for God speaks by Malachi and
declares that, whereas Israel is His beloved son, Esau, that is Edom,
He has 'hated' (Mal. i. 3). No Israelite therefore who reads his
scriptures (St. Paul would conclude) ought to have failed to perceive
an inscrutable element in God's choice of his chosen people. He ought
not to have felt in his own case, any more than in that of the first
children of Abraham or Isaac, that he could be sure of membership in
the people of God merely because of his physical descent.
I say the truth in Christ, I lie not, my conscience bearing witness
with me in the Holy Ghost, that I have great sorrow and unceasing pain
in my heart. For I could wish[3] that I myself were anathema from
Christ for my {18} brethren's sake, my kinsmen according to the flesh:
who are Israelites; whose is the adoption, and the glory, and the
covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service _of God_, and the
promises; whose are the fathers, and of whom is Christ as concerning
the flesh, who is over all, God blessed for ever. Amen. But _it is_
not as though the word of God hath come to nought. For they are not
all Israel, which are of Israel: neither, because they are Abraham's
seed, are they all children: but, In Isaac shall thy seed be called.
That is, it is not the children of the flesh that are children of God;
but the children of the promise are reckoned for a seed. For this is a
word of promise, According to this season will I come, and Sarah shall
have a son. And not only so; but Rebecca also having conceived by one,
_even_ by our father Isaac--for _the children_ being not yet born,
neither having done anything good or bad, that the purpose of God
according to election might stand, not of works, but of him that
calleth, it was said unto her, The elder shall serve the younger. Even
as it is written, Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.
1. St. Paul's earnest asseveration is very noticeable in form. It
shows so much of his instinctive inward life. He lives 'in Christ,'
who is light as well as life[4], and to speak the truth is the very
atmosphere of this new life[5]. As it comes natural to many people to
say 'upon my word as a gentleman,' it comes natural to St. Paul to say,
'speaking as in Christ, who is the light.' And his natural
conscience--that is the faculty of passing judgement on one's own
actions, {19} which in St. Paul's case bears witness to the truth of
what he says by passing no censure on him--that too does not act of
itself merely, but in the Spirit of the new life, the Holy Spirit of
Christ, which inspires and ratifies the moral judgement, otherwise so
liable to be degraded or perverted or silenced: his conscience bears
witness with his word in the Holy Ghost. Here, then, is the whole
secret of Christian truthfulness. The Christian is truthful because he
lives and speaks in God, in Christ, in the Spirit.
As to St. Paul's half-expressed prayer ('I was praying,' he says, i.e.
'I caught myself praying'), it resembles that of Moses for his
rebellious people[6]. 'And now, O Lord, if thou wilt forgive their
sin--; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou
hast written.' But St. Paul's instinctive desire is not apparently
like that of Moses, to perish with his people rather than be saved
without them; but to offer himself for rejection with a view to their
salvation. The prayer is, as St. Paul implies, an impossible prayer,
but it expresses, as hardly anything else could, the intensity of his
feeling. And such intensity of feeling was natural to the deep
religious patriotism of a Jew.
{20}
We may illustrate St. Paul's feeling by comparing a fine expression of
a more commonplace sorrow over the ruin of Israel from a period after
the destruction of Jerusalem[7]. 'Now therefore I will speak; touching
man in general, thou knowest best; but touching thy people will I
speak, for whose sake I am sorry; and for thine inheritance, for whose
cause I mourn; and for Israel, for whom I am heavy; and for the seed of
Jacob, for whose sake I am troubled.' 'Thou seest that our sanctuary
is laid waste, our altar broken down, our temple destroyed; our
psaltery is brought low, our song is put to silence, our rejoicing is
at an end; the light of our candlestick is put out, the ark of our
covenant is spoiled, our holy things are defiled, and the name that is
called upon us is profaned; our freemen are despitefully treated, our
priests are burnt, our Levites are gone into captivity, our virgins are
defiled, and our wives ravished; our righteous men carried away, our
little ones betrayed, our young men are brought into bondage, and our
strong men are become weak; and, what is more than all, the seal of
Sion--for she hath now lost the seal of her {21} honour, and is
delivered into the hands of them that hate us.'
2. As we read St. Paul's enumeration of the glories of Israel, it is
of course obvious for us to pursue the line of thought taught us
elsewhere by St. Paul, and in the Epistle to the Hebrews; and to
recognize how each element of the 'glory,' which belonged once to the
Jewish 'ministration of condemnation,' belongs in deeper and fuller
measure to the Christian 'ministration of the Spirit[8].' Ours is the
vocation of the chosen people; ours is the sonship to God; and the
perpetual presence; and the security of divine covenant; ours is the
divine law, and with it, what is much better, the Spirit for its
accomplishment; ours is the corporate worship in spirit and in truth,
the Church's eucharist; for us, too, are promises which the realization
of those of the first covenant has made 'more sure'; ours finally is
the communion of the saints from Abraham onward into the body of
Christ. And in proportion therefore to the greatness of our
privileges, even as compared with those of the older covenant, is the
greatness of our responsibility; 'For I would not, brethren, have you
ignorant[9],' St. Paul would {22} say; he would not have us fail to
profit by the warnings of old days. And another voice warns us 'Of how
much sorer punishment shall he be thought worthy, who hath trodden
under foot the Son of God, and hath counted the blood of the covenant,
wherewith he was sanctified, an unholy thing, and hath done despite
unto the Spirit of grace[10].'
3. There has been amongst critics, since Erasmus, much controversy
over the clause, 'who is over all, God blessed for ever.' There is no
doubt that it is translated most naturally, and most agreeably to the
balance and movement of the sentence, if we attribute it to Christ, as
above. But many critics, including some who were orthodox, have
stumbled at the idea of St. Paul speaking of Christ straight out as
'over all, God blessed for ever.' Generally no doubt 'God' is used by
St. Paul as a proper name of the Father. But Christ is continually
recognized as possessing strictly divine attributes, and exercising
strictly divine functions; and in all St. Paul's epistles, beginning
with his earliest to the Thessalonians, He is God's Son, His own or
proper Son[11]. His blood, as shed for our ransoming, is God's own
blood, or {23} (possibly) the blood of one who is 'His own'[12]. He
subsisted eternally in the form, or essential attributes, of God, and
in possession of equality with Him; and He possesses now, as glorified
in humanity, the divine name of universal sovereignty, the object of
universal worship[13]. Therefore He is in the strictest sense divine;
and whatever or, I should say, whoever is essentially divine and proper
to the being of God, can rightly be called God. For, indeed, there is
nothing in the strict sense divine but God Himself. It was then merely
a question of time when Christians would become sufficiently familiar
with the new revelation of the threefold name to apply the word God to
the Son and the Spirit as naturally as to the Father. And there is
nothing really to surprise us in St. Paul here applying it to
Christ[14]: nothing certainly to warrant us in doing violence to the
sentence, in order to obviate the conclusion that he did so, by putting
a full stop after 'flesh,' and then supposing an abrupt exclamation 'He
who is over all is God blessed for ever[15]!'
{24}
Let it be recognized, then, that St. Paul here plainly speaks of Christ
as 'over all,' i.e. in His glorified manhood, and also as 'God blessed
for ever'--that is, as the one proper and eternal object of human
praise; and that he speaks of Him again elsewhere[16], as 'our great
God and Saviour.' It was only because He was essentially and eternally
'God' that He could, in our manhood and as the reward of His human
obedience, be exalted to divine sovereignty and be 'over all.'
4. In the rest of the section St. Paul is arguing with a Jew, who
makes the claim that because of the divine covenant God is bound to the
Israelites, and to all Israelites for ever. 'We have Abraham to our
father,' and that is enough[17]. The higher prophetic spirit of the
Old Testament had already realized that God's election of Israel was a
challenge to her to prove herself worthy of an undeserved
privilege[18], and that, though a faithful remnant would {25} never
fail, yet unfaithfulness in the bulk of the nation would bring
destruction upon them and loss of God's favour[19]. The prophetic
spirit had realized also that God's servant Israel was not 'called' for
his own selfish honour's sake, but was entrusted with a divine ministry
to fulfil for all the nations of the earth[20]. It is to this higher
sense of what Israel's position meant, and the perils it involved, that
John the Baptist and our Lord Himself had sought to recall the Jews.
They must not 'think to say within themselves, They had Abraham for
their Father; for God was able of the stones to raise up children unto
Abraham.' For 'many should come from the east and the west, and sit
down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of God, and the
sons of the kingdom should be cast into {26} the outer darkness[21].'
But it is evident that this higher meaning of the doctrine of election
had been forgotten by contemporary Judaism, and they would not be
recalled to it. They refused to contemplate the spiritual risk of
missing their vocation, or the universal purpose for which it was
given. They chose to think that Israel, i.e. the actual Israelites in
bulk, _must_ remain God's elect; that the Christ, when He came, must
come to exalt their race and nation: that they were bound to inherit
the blessings of the world to come: that the divine government of the
world existed for their sakes[22].
St. Paul, then, is here intending to vindicate the real meaning of
election, in the sense in which it is bound up with the ethical
character of God and carries with it a deepened feeling of
responsibility in those who are the subjects of it. {27} But his
argument is directed, first of all, to one point only--to bringing the
eyes of the Jews straight up to their own scriptures, and forcing them
to see that _they_ do not justify the idea of election purely by race.
It is not all of a certain seed, but only part of it, that is chosen.
There is nothing to hinder a great part of the race again becoming as
Ishmael or as Edom by the side of Israel. Ultimately, no doubt, there
are _two_ points to be proved. First, that God's method of choosing an
elect body to be His people in the world is inscrutable, so that we
cannot produce or determine His election by any calculation, or by any
real or supposed merits, of ours; secondly, that though we cannot
create our vocation, we can retain it by moral correspondence or faith,
and by that only. But at present it is only the first point that is
insisted upon--the absolute, inscrutable element in the divine choice.
And that, we should notice, is a fact not merely of scriptural evidence
but of common experience. Men are born to higher and lower positions
of privilege and opportunity. They are born Jacobs or Esaus, in
respect of moral, intellectual, religious, or physical endowment--with
ten talents, or five, or two, or one; and God does not often give us so
{28} much as a glimpse of the reason why. All He does make clear to us
is that the determination of human vocations, higher or lower, is in
wiser hands than ours.
It is of course evident, as has already been said, that what St. Paul
is speaking about is the election of men, and specially races or
nations of men, to a position of _spiritual privilege in this world_.
We know now, better than the Jews of the Old Covenant could know it,
that behind all the apparent injustices and inequalities of this world
lies the rectifying equity of God. St. Peter had come to believe that
the divine mercy had rectified in the world beyond death the apparently
rough and heavy handed judgement upon the rejected mass of mankind in
the time of the Flood. That physical catastrophe at least was an
instrument of mercy in disguise[23]. St. Paul believed the same about
all God's rejections, as well as elections, in this world. They served
one universal purpose: 'That he might have mercy upon all[24].' But
{29} all the same here and now in this world God does work by means of
enormous inequalities. There are Jacobs whom He plainly loves, upon
whom He showers all His richest blessings, and Esaus whom, to judge
from present evidence, we should say He hates--whom He sets to live in
hardest and most cramping surroundings. And no man can determine which
lot he shall enjoy. That lies in the inscrutable selectiveness of God.
That there is no question at all about the eternal welfare of the
individual Esau's soul--that the question is simply of the comparative
status of Israel and Edom in this world--appears plainly in the passage
of Malachi, which St. Paul quotes. And we must notice how unexpected
an application St. Paul gives to this passage in a direction most
unfamiliar to Jewish thought. For Edom was to the Jew the very type of
all that was most hateful. He anticipated for the Edomites God's worst
vengeance, as for Israel God's best blessings. But St. Paul forces him
to think--Why should he assume that he will be better off than Edom?
Edom was once physically on Israel's level, or his superior in claim,
when their first fathers were but just born infants. But God chose one
{30} and not the other. He may exercise the like unscrutable
selectiveness upon the seed of Israel to-day. And Edom did not remain
in a merely secondary position. He sank to be a byword for all that is
most hateful to God. Be warned, St. Paul would say, it may be that
'with change of name the tale is told of thee[25].'
[1] Exod. iv. 23; Hos. xi. 1.
[2] Exod. xvi. 10.
[3] Or 'pray' (marg.) literally 'I was praying.'
[4] Cf. Eph. v. 8-14.
[5] Cf. Col. iii. 9.
[6] Exod. xxxii. 32.
[7] 2 Esdr. viii. 15-16, x. 21-23. The latter passage is not spoken to
God, but by one Jew to another.
[8] 2 Cor. iii. 8.
[9] See 1 Cor. x. 1-13.
[10] Heb. x. 29.
[11] 1 Thess. i. 10; Rom. viii. 3.
[12] Acts xx. 28.
[13] Phil. ii. 6-11.
[14] Without the article which makes it a proper name of the Father.
[15] R. V. margin^2. It does further violence to the Greek to
translate as R. V. margin^1, 'He who is God over all is (be) blessed
for ever.' I have nothing to add on the matter to S. and H. _in loc._,
especially p. 236.
[16] Tit. ii. 13. This is probably the right rendering.
[17] St. Matt. iii. 9.
[18] Great stress was laid by the prophets on the absence of any
original merit or power in Israel, which caused the divine election;
see Ezek. xvi, Deut. xxvi. 5.
[19] See especially Amos ix. 7-10: 'Are ye not as the children of the
Ethiopians unto me, O children of Israel? saith the Lord. Have not I
brought up Israel out of the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from
Caphtor, and the Syrians from Kir? Behold, the eyes of the Lord God
are upon the sinful kingdom, and I will destroy it from off the face of
the earth; saving that I will not utterly destroy the house of Jacob,
saith the Lord. For, lo, I will command, and I will sift the house of
Israel among all the nations, like as corn is sifted in a sieve, yet
shall not the least grain fall upon the earth. All the sinners of my
people shall die by the sword, which say, The evil shall not overtake
nor prevent us.'
[20] Gen. xii. 3; Isa. lxvi. 18; Zech. viii. 23, &c.
[21] Matt. viii. 11, 12.
[22] In Weber's _Juedische Theologie_ (Leipzig, 1897, formerly called
_System der Altsynagog. Palaestin. Theol._ or _Die Lehre des Talmud_),
pp. 51 ff, there are striking illustrations from the Talmud of this
fixed tendency of thought among the Jews. Thus 'there exists no
clearer proof of the Talmudic conviction of the absolutely holy
character of Israel than that in all the places of Scripture in which
Israel is reproved and has evil attributed to it, the expression, "the
haters of Israel," is substituted for Israel.' 'We read: Isaiah was
punished, because he called Israel a people of unclean lips,' &c. Cf.
S. and H., p. 249, and my _Ephesians_, p. 261.
[23] 1 Pet. iv. 6. 'The gospel was preached to' these 'dead men that
they might be judged according to men in the flesh,' i.e. by perishing
in the flood, 'but live according to God in the spirit,' i.e. through
our Lord's preaching in Hades. There is, I think, so far, no ambiguity
about this passage.
[24] Not, however, without regard to man's will to respond to the
divine offer, see later, p. 82 ff.
[25] Mal. i. 2, 3. 'Was not Esau Jacob's brother? saith the Lord: yet
I loved Jacob; but Esau I hated, and made his mountains a desolation,
and gave his heritage to the jackals of the wilderness. Whereas Edom
saith, We are beaten down, but we will return,' &c. This passage (1)
plainly refers to _Esau_ as meaning _Edom_, the people; (2) describes
not the original lot of Esau, which was secondary indeed, but highly
blessed (Gen. xxvii. 39, 40); but the ultimate lot of Esau when he had
misused his original endowment in violence and cruelty.
{31}
DIVISION IV. Sec. 2. CHAPTER IX. 14-29.
_God's liberty in showing mercy and judgement always retained and
asserted._
But the obvious reply of the Jewish objector to St. Paul's assertion of
the absolute and apparently arbitrary freedom of God's election is that
it is unfair. It convicts God of unrighteousness. To this objection
(ver. 14), which St. Paul deprecates with horror, he replies not by any
large consideration of divine justice, but still by keeping the Jew to
his own scriptures. The God revealed in scripture must be to the
objector still the just God. He cannot call God unjust if His method
as it now appears is that to which He called attention long ago. Look
back, then, at the past records. Did God disclose Himself as bound to
show mercy on Moses the Israelite, or to harden and judicially condemn
Pharaoh the Egyptian? No, He declares to Moses His unrestricted
freedom to exhibit His {32} compassion on whom He will (Exod. xxxiii.
19). Men cannot by any choice or efforts of their own produce an
exhibition of divine favour such as was shown to Moses the leader of
Israel: the absolute initiative must come from God, and in taking that
initiative He declares Himself absolutely free. In the same way God
implicitly asserts His sovereign freedom when He brings Pharaoh out
upon the stage of history as an example of the way in which He hardens
men's hearts with a hardening which is the prelude to overthrow, that
men all over the world may see and tremble at the divine power. It is
not because Pharaoh is an Egyptian that he is hardened. He is
hardened, as Moses has compassion shown him, simply because it is the
will of God so to do in his case.
But the objector comes forward again (ver. 19): 'If this is the
arbitrary method of God--if we are simply powerless puppets in the
hands of an absolute and arbitrary will, to be saved or be
destroyed--at any rate He has no reason to complain of us. If all the
power is His, so is the responsibility.' Now St. Paul has it in his
hand to show that there remains to man a very real power to retain his
position, and consequently a very real responsibility and room for {33}
being blamed or praised: for if we cannot create our vocation, we can
and we are required to correspond with it in a reverent and docile
faith; and it was exactly here that the Jews had failed, in spite of
all their prophets had taught them. But he keeps back this answer
awhile, because he finds the attitude of such an objector toward God in
itself so reprehensible. Such an one has not given consideration to
what the relation of man to God really is--the creature to the creator.
His critical, complaining attitude is nothing better than foolish.
Thus he takes his antagonist back upon the old prophetic metaphor of
the potter and his clay, with which Isaiah and Jeremiah had rebuked the
arrogance and impatience of men long ago: 'Shall the thing framed say
of him that framed it, He hath no understanding; and shall the clay say
to him that fashioneth it, What makest thou[1]?' He follows, however,
most closely upon the later writer of the Book of Wisdom: 'For a
potter, kneading soft earth, laboriously mouldeth each several vessel
for our service: nay, out of the same clay doth fashion both the
vessels that minister to clean uses, and those of a contrary sort. All
in {34} like manner; but what shall be the use of each vessel of either
sort, the craftsman himself is the judge[2].' The thought was often in
St. Paul's mind of the inequality of lots in the world and the Church.
There are more and less honourable limbs in the body politic: there are
vessels for honourable and vessels for dishonourable purposes in the
great social economy[3]. So it is with the races of men. They are all
of one blood--of the one lump. But some have high and others low
vocations, and the right to determine of what sort the lot shall be in
each case lies absolutely with the Divine Potter. It is childish to
dispute His title. And not only so: when the potter, whom Jeremiah was
ordered to observe, found a vessel he was making marred under his hand,
'he made it again another vessel, as seemed good to the potter to make
it[4].' Accordingly, when the chosen material (i.e. the Jews) would
not mould to the high purpose for which the Potter was fashioning it,
who shall complain if He diverted it to lower uses or threw it away to
destruction, and produced out {35} of His stores other vessels which He
had already prepared and destined for glorious functions (that is to
say, the Gentile Christians)? But the case is even stronger than this.
Who indeed shall complain if, when the vessels originally destined for
the higher uses prove fit for nothing but destruction, the Divine
Potter--though willing, now as in the case of Pharaoh, to let His wrath
fall and to manifest His power--yet shows almost unlimited forbearance
with them (as in fact God did with the Jews); and when at last He does
let His wrath fall, only does so in order to manifest anew the
resourcefulness of His mercy[5] upon a new and larger Israel, gathered
not from among the Jews only, but from among all nations, to be the
object of His compassionate regard?
Indeed, the prophet Hosea (ii. 23, i. 10) foresaw this choice of a yet
unrecognized people to be God's people. Isaiah again (x. 22)
anticipated no more than a remnant surviving of all the multitudes of
Israel, because of the sharpness and conclusiveness of the divine
judgement upon them. And (i. 9) it is only to the compassion of God
that he attributes their exemption by means {36} of the faithful
remnant from entire annihilation, like that of the Cities of the Plain.
What shall we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God? God
forbid. For he saith to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I have mercy,
and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion. So then it is
not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that hath
mercy. For the scripture saith unto Pharaoh, For this very purpose did
I raise thee up, that I might shew in thee my power, and that my name
might be published abroad in all the earth. So then he hath mercy on
whom he will, and whom he will he hardeneth.
Thou wilt say then unto me, Why doth he still find fault? For who
withstandeth his will? Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest
against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why
didst thou make me thus? Or hath not the potter a right over the clay,
from the same lump to make one part a vessel unto honour, and another
unto dishonour? What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make
his power known, endured with much longsuffering vessels of wrath
fitted unto destruction: and that he might make known the riches of his
glory upon vessels of mercy, which he afore prepared unto glory, _even_
us, whom he also called, not from the Jews only, but also from the
Gentiles? As he saith also in Hosea,
I will call that my people, which was not my people;
And her beloved, which was not beloved.
And it shall be, _that_ in the place where it was said
unto them, Ye are not my people,
There shall they be called sons of the living God.
And Isaiah crieth concerning Israel, If the number of the children of
Israel be as the sand of the sea, it is the {37} remnant that shall be
saved: for the Lord will execute _his_ word upon the earth, finishing
it and cutting it short. And, as Isaiah hath said before,