the guise of disloyalty; and not even Jeremiah 'weakening the hands of
the men of war[8]' in the conflict with the power of Babylon, while all
the time his very heart was bleeding for Jerusalem, presents a more
pathetic and moving picture of such patriotism than does St. Paul as he
here shows himself to us. While he was shaking off the dust of his
feet, as he left the synagogues to turn to the Gentiles, while he was
throwing all his tremendous energy into the apostolate of the nations,
and vindicating their cause, even to fierceness, against the narrowness
of his own nation, all the time the thought which buoyed him up was
that when the catholic church had become an established fact--when it
should have become plain, even to Jewish eyes, that the elect people of
God is now a fraternity of all nations, and not their own race
only--then it could not fail to happen, that the members of the ancient
people, finding themselves in their turn 'alienated,' 'strangers,' and
'far off,' while {76} they knew so well, and needed so deeply, the
fellowship of the covenant, should be stimulated to resume their former
privileges. Surely then at last Israel 'should remember her way and be
ashamed,' and 'receive' her Gentile 'sisters,' though they had been to
her as 'Sodom and Samaria,' and though they were now given to her for
'daughters, but not by her covenant'--not by any means on her own
terms[9]. All the time that St. Paul is fighting Judaism and
vindicating Catholicism, laying down the lines of the great church of
the nations, this is the vision that cheers him--an Israel, penitent,
humbled, worshipping the Christ whom she had crucified, and therefore
welcomed back again with the honour due to her great memories and her
inextinguishable vocation. But we notice by the way, as throwing an
unmistakable light on the circumstances of Roman Christianity, that
while St. Paul thus shows his own Jewish feeling, he speaks to the
Roman Christian as in the mass Gentile[10].
2. If so miserable an event, one so revolting to the divine heart, as
the apostasy of Israel, had yet in the determinate counsel and
foreknowledge of God been overruled so as to {77} become the occasion
for the calling of the Gentiles, it must needs be, St. Paul argues,
that an event so dear to the heart of God as the recovery of Israel,
would have a result even more blessed, nothing less than 'life from the
dead.' What does this last expression mean? Does St. Paul mean that
when once the chosen people was recovered into a really catholic
church, there would be no further delay--the consummation would be
reached, the resurrection of the dead which is to accompany the
(second) coming of the Christ would take place at once? This thought
would be very natural to St. Paul, and thoroughly agreeable to the old
Messianic expectation; and it would give, as nothing else gives so
well, the needed climax to the sentence. Moreover it cannot be said
that the idea of the resurrection was not intimately associated among
Christians with the return of the Christ in glory. But, on the other
hand, nowhere else does St. Paul speak of 'the resurrection' so
absolutely and without explanation as the goal of all things; and, if
he had meant so to speak of it here, he would surely have said '_the_
resurrection,' and not used the vaguer expression 'life from the dead.'
As he has used this we must interpret it in terms {78} of Ezekiel's
vision[11]: the recovery of Israel will be nothing less than a case of
dead men coming to life again, of dry bones revivified. The only
drawback to this interpretation is--what need not trouble us much--the
failure of rhetorical climax. This revival of dead Israel is hardly a
greater thing than the reconciliation of an alienated world. And,
though it would improve the rhetorical climax to interpret the phrase
as meaning that the whole catholic church would have new life put into
it by Israel's recovery, and though we should expect this idea to prove
true, yet I do not think it is natural to introduce it here.
3. St. Paul's language--'beloved for the fathers' sake,' 'if the root
be holy, so are the branches'--comes very close to the current Jewish
language about 'the merits of the fathers,' and yet is deeply
distinguished from it. The Jews as represented in the Talmud--and the
belief goes back to St. Paul's time[12]--believed that no prayer was so
effective as that which was offered in the name of 'the fathers.'
Thus: 'How many prayers did Elijah speak on Mount Carmel that fire
might fall from heaven, and he was not heard; but when he mentioned
{79} the name of the dead, and called Jehovah the God of Abraham, Isaac
and Jacob, then at once he was heard. So was it in the case of Moses.
When the Israelites had accomplished that bad work, Moses stood up and
spoke for their justification forty days and forty nights, and was not
heard. But when he mentioned the dead, he was at once heard....
Therefore as the living vine supports itself on a dead stock (i.e.
grows out of a stock dry and seemingly dead), so Israel lives and
supports itself on the fathers since they are dead[13].' The
individual Israelite, moreover, could supply his own deficiencies in
righteousness out of the treasury of merits which belonged to him in
virtue of his descent from the common fathers of the race, or the holy
progenitors of his own family. In other words the Israelites in
various ways and senses depended for salvation on having 'Abraham to
their father.' And it has already appeared sufficiently how dangerous
this belief was; and how utterly St. Paul, like Ezekiel[14] and John
{80} the Baptist before him, repudiated this idea of genealogical and
traditional merit as a ground of confidence before God.
On the other hand, this belief in the transference of merit was based
on a true idea of the organic unity of the race. The Jewish race was
bound up into one with its great progenitors; and it is these men who
are its true representatives. They show what their race can be and is
meant to be, and along what lines it is meant to move. Their election
and walk with God laid a consecration on all who came after them; as
St. Paul elsewhere says that the children of a Christian parent in a
mixed marriage are holy, i.e. have a consecration laid upon them by
their partly Christian parentage[15]. The patriarchs exhibit Israel as
God means it to be. And God, so to speak, cannot forget that every
Israelite is a child of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, and that in their
faith and religion lies his possibility and his glory.
Thus stated, the idea of the 'communion of saints' in the Jewish race
is nothing else than a ground of hope, and a stimulus to recovery. And
the idea admits at once of being transferred to the catholic Israel, as
in fact its Jewish {81} parody has, at certain periods, been only too
fully and fatally transferred. I say, the true idea admits of being
transferred. We belong to the same body as the apostles and martyrs,
the virgins and saints, the Jewish patriarchs and prophets also. Their
possibilities are ours. Their God is our God for ever and ever. And
God looks on us as in one body with them. We too are beloved for these
our fathers' sakes. And they too, we cannot doubt, are conscious of
our fellowship with them, and if we are trying to live in the same
spirit with them, we must believe, all the limitations of our knowledge
notwithstanding, that they are supporting and helping us, as in Christ
our sympathetic advocates and allies.
4. The metaphor of the olive and the grafting is intelligible enough
without explanation. We know how often the olive and the vine are
taken in the Old Testament and in other Jewish writings--as in the
passage just quoted from the Talmud--for a symbol of Israel; we must
frankly recognize that St. Paul, apparently in forgetfulness and not by
design, accommodates the physical process of grafting to its spiritual
counterpart; for in physical fact, of course, the ingrafted shoot
(which represents the Gentiles), {82} and not the stock upon which it
is grafted (which represents the Jews), would determine the character
and produce of the tree: but when this is once recognized it may be
forgotten, and the metaphor is as intelligible to us as if the physical
process of grafting were really as St. Paul represents it.
5. As we read the words, 'And so all Israel shall be saved,' we cannot
help asking ourselves--Does St. Paul mean us to believe this of all
Israelites without exception, or even of Israel in general with an
absolute necessity? I think the answer should be a negative in both
cases[16]. Just above St. Paul says, looking at the matter from the
side of Israel, 'They also, _if they continue not in unbelief_, shall
be grafted in.' Here he is looking at the matter from the side of God.
It lies in the divine purpose that the establishment of the catholic
church, and the experience of alienation on the part of the Jews,
should stimulate them to regain their ancient privileges on a new
basis; 'and so,' looking at the matter from the point of view of the
divine intention, 'all Israel shall be saved.' Just below, from the
same point of view, it is stated to be God's purpose {83} 'to have
mercy upon all men.' But, in interpreting this latter passage, we are
doing violence to what St. Paul says elsewhere with emphatic
distinctness, if we imagine that he asserts that all individual men
without exception shall ultimately attain the end of their being and
the fellowship of God. In these passages, as elsewhere, St. Paul looks
at things from two points of view, without attempting to present us
with a harmony of them. From one point of view we have spread out
before us the 'mystery,' or revealed secret of God, and discern the
purpose of His love working on, and finding its opportunities even in
the gravest moral disasters. From the other point of view we detect
human wilfulness, able in a measure, but never completely or on the
whole, to baffle and thwart the divine purpose. St. Paul, I say, is
content to recognize both points of view, and not to hold them in
complete combination. He uses the perception of the divine purpose--in
this case, the recovery of the Jews--as a motive for hope and
thankfulness and renewed energy; but he does not, apparently, ask
himself the metaphysical questions whether God foreknows how particular
individuals or groups of men will act, or, if we must say that God does
so foreknow how each {84} man will act, how this is reconcilable with
his moral freedom. He is content to adore the divine purpose, and rest
upon it; and recognize, on the other hand, the thwarting power of human
wilfulness.
From the point of view of God's patiently loving purpose, then, a great
and fresh opportunity is being prepared for the recovery of the whole
of Israel, when 'the times of the Gentiles' are fulfilled and the
Church stands really catholic before their eyes. Just in the same way,
in the larger field of all mankind, the purpose of God is at work
through all rejections, and all judgements of hardening, to convince
all men of their need of God, and so prepare their hearts 'that he
might have mercy upon all.' But from the other point of view God
respects human freedom. Thus over against the divine purpose stands
the ambiguous human 'if'--'if they continue not in their unbelief.'
This ambiguous human element is a prominent feature in Old Testament
prophecy, though there too the thwarting power of man's perverseness is
limited. If not in one way then in another, if not through one set of
agents then through others--on the whole the purpose of God finds its
sure way to accomplishment.
{85}
* * * * *
_Retrospect over the argument_
And now that we have given all the pains we can to entering into the
spirit of these chapters, may we not say that they have become no
longer repellent but deeply attractive? Where could we find a more
liberating outlook over the wide purpose of God in redeeming the world?
Sin is a stern fact, and demands stern dealing to overcome it by moral
discipline. Men of all sorts must be brought to realize their need of
God, utterly to expel the false dream of independence, and humbly to
welcome the unmerited bounty of the divine 'mercy,' the free gift of
pardon and new life. This then is the way in which the fundamental
purpose of God for man shows itself in a world of sin; it is by a
discipline preparing men to welcome a divine mercy of which they have
learnt to know their need. 'That he may have mercy upon all'--this is
the generous end upon which all the divine dealings with men converge.
The Jews by one kind of discipline while they still were standing
together as the elect people of God, and by another when, having
rejected the Christ and fallen out of their religious leadership, they
were to be stirred to {86} jealousy by the spectacle of a divine
fellowship from which they were excluded: the Gentiles by a different
sort of discipline, and each separate race by its own; nay more, every
individual, Jew and Greek, Englishman or Hindoo, by a distinctive
personal chastening, in as many ways as man is various and God is
resourceful: all men are so to be dealt with as that all men shall be
brought to confess themselves to be as they are in God's sight, and
surrender themselves to Him to be refashioned after the divine image.
Through all national and personal vocations realized, by which human
character is educated: through all national and personal humiliations,
which are divine judgements by which human character is corrected and
made docile: God's untiring patience and forbearance, in sternness and
in love, works on to the one universal end--that He might have mercy
upon all. The uttermost and most pitiable collapse, even the imminence
of death itself, may be, nay certainly in God's intention is, His
remedy for human wilfulness: a means by which--
'God unmakes but to remake the soul
He else made first in vain, which must not be[17].'
{87} --must not be, that is, so far as the resourcefulness of divine
love, going all lengths short of destroying the fundamental moral
choice of the soul, can avail to prevent it. This teaching of St. Paul
suggests a wonderful way of reading human history, and inspires us with
the right sort of patience and hopefulness in our attitude towards the
wider problems of missionary work and our own dealings with
individuals. The races to whose conversion we would fain minister seem
so immovable and so indifferent. The men and women whom we would fain
help seem so hardened or so weak. But 'the gifts and callings of God'
within them and about them, 'are without repentance.' God's remedies
for them are not yet exhausted. We therefore have a right to hope and
labour on, 'never despairing[18].'
And where is a nobler presentation to be found than here of the idea of
divine election? That in the great household of the world there are
magnificent and (comparatively, at least) ignominious vocations among
races and individuals; {88} that some men are born for the top, and
other men for the bottom of society; that there are 'honourable' and
'dishonourable' limbs in the body of humanity, the latter fulfilling
their necessary function no less than the former, is an indisputable
fact. It is no use challenging it, any more than any other fundamental
law of the universe. And, if we can see why certain races and certain
individuals are fitted for certain tasks, yet on the whole we can
advance but a very little way in seeing the reason of human
inequalities as in fact they exist. All that lies in the inscrutable
and free counsels of God, and the responsibility is--in spite of the
modifying effects of human sin--ultimately His[19]. But in St. Paul's
treatment of it, the recognition of the fact that God works universal
ends through selected races and individuals, is robbed of all that
ministers to pride and narrowness in the elect, or to hopelessness and
a sense of injustice in the rest.
The New Testament writers in general would teach us that with God is no
respect of persons; {89} so that the lowest vocation may result in the
highest glory, where it is faithfully fulfilled, and the highest
vocation, misused, in the deepest degradation; but St. Paul in
particular makes us feel the humbling responsibility which attaches
necessarily to any state of election. The Jews failed because they
lacked the faith and docility which would have enabled them to
correspond to God's larger leading. The time came when God who had,
'through the Jews, prepared the Christ for the world,' had also,
'through the Gentiles, prepared the world for Christ'; but the Jews
were ready neither to welcome the Christ, nor to 'receive' the world.
Thus the richest ministry ever vouchsafed to a race was waiting for the
Jews, and they proved false to it, because they had turned their
privileges into an occasion for pride and selfishness, and would not
learn the new truth or rise to the new opportunity.
Here is a serious warning to the 'elect' of every age. How often has
the church at large, or a national church, refused the call to
expansion, and lost some rich part of its heritage because it was
self-satisfied, and therefore blind? How often does a 'good catholic'
fail to recognize that he is utterly misusing the gifts of grace, {90}
if his Catholicism does not mean a generous and self-sacrificing desire
to win the lost and save the world? How often has the profession of
being 'saved' put an end to spiritual growth and the struggle with sin?
How many religious orders and societies have lived on the reputation of
the past, and appeared to fancy that the achievements of their
founders--'the merits of the fathers'--would justify the apathy and
carelessness of those who had inherited an honourable name? Indeed, to
whatever we are elect--whether national, or ecclesiastical, or personal
privileges--the temptation dogs us to rest on our inherited merits and
have no open ear to the guiding voice of God, as it calls us to fresh
ventures and renewed sacrifices, like those which laid the basis of the
position of which we now make our empty or insolent boast. But thus to
evade the uncomfortable requirements of the present by an appeal to the
achievements of the past--whether it be the past of catholic tradition
or 'the Reformation settlement'--is to expose ourselves inevitably to
divine condemnation.
Those who keep the open ear are the 'remnant' in every age and church
and nation. They are the men who refuse to 'make the word of God {91}
of none effect,' because of the blinding, deadening force of social
tradition. They are alive and awake to 'buy up the opportunity,' as it
presents itself. And for such St. Paul's teaching, inherited from the
prophets, of the function of the remnant is full of encouragement. The
Bible is a book contemptuous of majorities. The mass of men,
conventional, easily satisfied, self-centred, accomplish nothing,
redeem and regenerate nothing. But those who have ears to hear have
every motive, though they be few in number, to live at the highest
level possible, and believe to the full that the purpose of God can be
realized. God's purpose can work, and has in history worked, through
small minorities, through single individuals. They are the true
representatives of their church, their nation, their class. And when
the inner history of any epoch comes to be known, while the inert mass
of people, 'important' or 'unimportant,' is lost in the dim background,
they will be seen distinctive in the foreground: the real movement of
God in history, the real witness of the truth, the real spiritual
succession of the kingdom of God, will be seen to have been carried on
through them for the enriching of the whole world.
I would add two reflections on subordinate, {92} but still important
points. It is the function of the catholic church to let its light so
shine before men that it shall 'provoke to jealousy,' by the manifest
presence of God in the midst of it, the ancient and now alienated
people, the Jews. At the moment, with the anti-semite cry strong
throughout Europe, and on the morrow of the 'affaire Dreyfus,' these
words ring with a bitter irony. And in our own East London how utterly
unlikely it is that the spectacle of our Christianity should make the
Jews feel that Christian society cannot but be divine! Indeed, the
unfulfilled debt Christendom owes to the Jews is appalling. That
ancient and indomitable race retains, with all its faults, its
close-knitting sense of brotherhood, its faith, its frugality, its
industry, its patience, its heroism. We are meant to show it the
greater glories of the New Covenant, the splendour of the purity, the
unworldliness, the expansiveness, the love of the brotherhood of
Christ. And we do show it--what? Is there that in our common
Christianity, as they see it, which should obviously make Judaism
ashamed of itself? Could St. Paul, looking at our Christendom, have
expected 'all Israel to be saved' by the spectacle of a catholic
church? These are considerations {93} which indeed should drive us to
bitter penitence and earnest prayer.
Finally, before we leave these chapters, we shall do well to look
steadily at St. Paul's habit of mind in dealing with antithetic or
complementary truths. No one could believe with a more glorious
conviction than St. Paul in the dominance of the purpose of God in the
world: in the certainty of the accomplishment of what God has
predestined. If the very rejection of the Christ by the Jews was
turned into an opportunity for the conversion of the Gentiles, what
crime can be too great for the divine wisdom to overrule it for good?
No one, on the other hand, could realize more deeply the responsibility
which lies upon men: their strange power to correspond with God, or
partly thwart His purpose for them and through them. My point is only
this: he is true to both sides of an antithesis, even though the exact
relationship and interworking of the twin truths is necessarily and
finally obscure. He refuses to be one-sided at the requirement of an
incomplete human logic. It has been often pointed out, and in many
directions, how prone we all are to take up with one side of
truth--with predestination or free-will, with the divinity or the
manhood {94} of Christ, with the unity or the trinity of the Godhead,
with sacraments or conversion, with authority or personal judgement;
and if we are intellectually disposed, we call our one-sidedness 'being
logical.' But we had better let St. Paul teach us once for all that
impartiality is a greater thing than this cheap logic; even as Church
history teaches us that a sharp-witted but one-sided zeal for truth is
one main cause of bitterness, narrowness, and schism.
[1] I follow, by preference, the paragraphs of the R.V., unless there
is very strong reason to the contrary.
[2] Cf. 2 Cor. v. 19, 'God was in Christ reconciling the world unto
Himself.'
[3] Num. xv. 20, 21.
[4] 'The Lord called thy name A green olive tree.' Jer. xi. 16; Hos.
xiv. 6.
[5] On 'mystery,' see _Ephesians_, p. 73. It means a divine secret
disclosed to the elect.
[6] Isa. lix. 20, according to the Greek, and xxvii. 9. Cf. Ezek.
xxxvi. 25, 26.
[7] Isa. xl. 13. Cf. Job xxxviii. 4; xli. 11; Wisd. ix. 13.
[8] Jer. xxxviii. 4.
[9] Ezek. xvi. 61.
[10] See above, vol. i. 3.
[11] Ezek. xxxvii.
[12] See my _Ephesians_, pp. 258 ff.
[13] Quoted, with much other illustrative matter, by Weber, _l.c._, pp.
293 ff. The fancy is based on 1 Kings xix. 36; Exod. xxxii. 13. Cf.
on Cant. i. 5, 'I am black but comely'--'The congregation of Israel
speaks: I am black through mine own works, but lovely through the works
of my fathers.'
[14] Ezek. xiv. 14.
[15] 1 Cor. vii. 14.
[16] 'All Israel,' in 1 Kings xii. 1, 2 Chron. xii. 1, Dan. ix. 11,
means 'Israel in general.'
[17] These words (which in their full sense seem to go beyond what we
have a right to say) occur in Browning's _Ring and the Book_. It is
the Pope's final reflection, when he condemns Guido to death, that his
execution may be the one chance for his spiritual recovery--
'In the main criminal I see no chance
Except in such a suddenness of fate.'
[18] Luke vi. 35, or 'despairing of no man,' marg. R.V.
[19] We hold, therefore, with regard to the lots of men in this world,
exactly the opposite of what Plato suggested under the impulse of the
doctrine of transmigration, 'It is the man's own choice, God is
blameless.'
{95}
DIVISION V. CHAPTERS XII-XV. 13.
_Practical Exhortation._