verse: "not that we are sufficient of ourselves, to account anything as
from ourselves; but our sufficiency is from God." This vehement
disclaimer of any self-sufficiency has naturally been taken in the
widest sense, and theologians from Augustine downward have found in it
one of the most decisive proofs of the inability of man for any
spiritual good accompanying salvation. No one, we may be sure, would
have ascribed salvation, and all spiritual good accompanying it,
entirely to God with more hearty sincerity than the Apostle; but it does
seem better here to give his words a narrower and more relevant
interpretation. The "sufficiency to account anything," of which he
speaks, must have a definite meaning for the context; and this meaning
is suggested by the words of chap. ii. 14-17. Paul would never have
dared, he tells us--indeed, he would never have been able--on his own
motion, and out of his own resources, either to form conclusions, or to
express them, on the subjects there in view. It is not for any man at
random to say what the true Gospel is, what are its issues, what the
responsibilities of its hearers or preachers, what is the spirit
requisite in the evangelist, or what are the methods legitimate for him.
The Gospel is God's concern, and only those who have been capacitated by
Him are entitled to speak as Paul has spoken. If this is a narrower
sense than that which is expounded so vigorously by Calvin, it is more
pertinent, and some will find it quite as pungent. Of all things that
are done hastily and inconsiderately, by people calling themselves
Christian, the criticism of evangelists is one of the most conspicuous.
At his own prompting, out of his own wise head, any man almost will both
make up his mind and speak his mind about any preacher with no sense of
responsibility whatever. Paul certainly did form opinions about
preachers, opinions which were anything but flattering; but he did it
through Jesus Christ and in relation to God; he did it because, as he
writes, God had made him sufficient, _i.e._ had given him capacity to
be, and the capacity of, a true evangelist, so that he knew both what
the Gospel was, and how it ought to be proclaimed. It would silence much
incompetent, because self-sufficient, criticism, if no one "thought
anything" who had not this qualification.
The qualification having been mentioned, the Apostle proceeds, as
usual, to enlarge upon it. "Our sufficiency is of God; who also made
us sufficient as ministers of a new covenant; not of letter, but of
spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life." At the
first glance, we see no reason why his thought should take this
direction, and it can only be because those whom he is opposing, and
with whom he has contrasted himself in chap. ii. 17, are in some sense
representatives of the old covenant, ministers of the letter in spite
of their claim to be evangelists, and appealing not to a competency
which came from God, but to one which rested on "the flesh." They
based their title to preach on certain advantages of birth, or on
having known Jesus when He lived in the world, or perhaps on
certification by others who had known Him; at all events, not on that
spiritual competence which Paul's ministry at Corinth had shown him to
possess. That this was really the case will be seen more fully at a
later stage (especially in chaps. x. ff.).
With the words "ministers of a new covenant" we enter upon one of the
great passages in St. Paul's writings, and are allowed to see one of
the inspiring and governing ideas in his mind. "Covenant," even to
people familiar with the Bible, is beginning to be a remote and
technical term; it needs to be translated or explained. If no more
than another word is to be used, perhaps "dispensation" or
"constitution" would suggest something. God's covenant with Israel was
the whole constitution under which God was the God of Israel, and
Israel the people of God. The new covenant of which Paul speaks
necessarily implies an old one; and the old one is this covenant with
Israel. It was a national covenant, and for that, among other reasons,
it was represented and embodied in legal forms. There was a legal
constitution under which the nation lived, and according to which all
God's dealings with it, and all its dealings with God, were regulated.
Without entering more deeply, in the meantime, into the nature of this
constitution, or the religious experiences which were possible to
those who lived under it, it is sufficient to notice that the best
spirits in the nation became conscious of its inadequacy, and
eventually of its failure. Jeremiah, who lived through the long agony
of his country's dissolution, and saw the final collapse of the
ancient order, felt this failure most deeply, and was consoled by the
vision of a brighter future. That future rested for him on a more
intimate relation of God to His people, on a constitution, as we may
fairly paraphrase his words, less legal and more spiritual. "Behold,
the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with
the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah: not according to the
covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by
the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which My covenant
they brake, although I was an husband unto them, saith the Lord. But
this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after
those days, saith the Lord; I will put my law in their inward parts,
and in their heart will I write it; and I will be their God, and they
shall be My people: and they shall teach no more every man his
neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for they
shall all know Me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them,
saith the Lord: for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin will
I remember no more." This wonderful passage, so profound, so
spiritual, so evangelical, is the utmost reach of prophecy; it is a
sort of stepping-stone between the Old Testament and the New. Jeremiah
has cried to God out of the depths, and God has heard his cry, and
raised him to a spiritual height from which his eye ranges over the
land of promise, and rests with yearning on all its grandest features.
We do not know whether many of his contemporaries or successors were
able to climb the mount which offered this glorious prospect; but we
know that the promise remained a promise--a rainbow light across the
dark cloud of national disaster--till Christ claimed its fulfilment as
His work. It was His to make good all that the prophets had spoken;
and when in the last hours of His life He said to His disciples, "This
is My blood of the covenant,[24] which is shed for many, for the
remission of sins," it was exactly as if He had laid His hand on that
passage of Jeremiah, and said, "This day is this scripture fulfilled
before your eyes." By the death of Jesus a new spiritual order was
established; it rested on the forgiveness of sins, it made God
accessible to all, it made obedience an instinct and a joy; all the
intercourse of God and man was carried on upon a new footing, under a
new constitution; to use the words of the prophet and the apostle, God
made a new covenant with His people.
Among the Christians of the first age, no one so thoroughly
appreciated the newness of Christianity, or was so immensely impressed
by it, as St. Paul. The difference between the earlier dispensation
and the later, between the religion of Moses' disciples and the
religion of believers in Jesus Christ, was one that could hardly be
exaggerated; he himself had been a zealot of the old, he was now a
zealot of the new; and the gulf between his former and his present
self was one that no geometry could measure. He had lived, after the
straitest sect of the old religion, a Pharisee; touching the
righteousness which is in the law he could call himself blameless; he
had tasted the whole bitterness of the legalism, the formality, the
bondage, in which the old covenant entangled those who were devoted to
it in his days. It is with this in his memory that he here sets the
old and the new in unrelieved opposition to each other. His feeling is
like that of a man who has just been liberated from prison, and whose
whole mind is possessed and filled up with the single sensation that
it is one thing to be chained, and another thing to be free. In the
passage before us, this is all the Apostle has in view. He speaks as
if the old covenant and the new had nothing in common, as if the new,
to borrow Baur's expression, had merely a negative relation to the
old, as if it could only be contrasted with it, and not compared to
it, or illustrated by it. And with this restricted view he
characterises the old dispensation as one of letter, and the new as
one of spirit.[25] Speaking out of his own experience, which was not
solitary, but typical, he could truly speak thus. The essence of the
old, to a Pharisee born and bred, was its documentary, statutory
character: the law, written in letters, on stone tablets or parchment
sheets, simply confronted men with its uninspiring imperative; it had
never yet given any one a good conscience or enabled him to attain to
the righteousness of God. The essence of the new, on the other hand,
was spirit; the Christian was one in whom, through Christ, the Holy
Spirit of God dwelt, putting the righteousness of God within his
reach, enabling him to perfect holiness in God's fear. The contrast is
made absolute, _pro tem_. There is no "spirit" in the old at all;
there is no "letter" in the new. This last assertion was more natural
then than now; for at the time when Paul wrote this Epistle, there was
no "New Testament of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ" consigned in
documents and collected for the use of the Church. The Gospel existed
in the world, not at all in books, but only in men; all the epistles
were living epistles; there was literally no letter, but only spirit.
This, doubtless, is the explanation of the blank antithesis of the old
covenant and the new in the passage before us. But it is obvious, when
we think of it, that this antithesis does not exhaust the relations of
the two. It is not the whole truth about the earlier dispensation to
say that, while the new is spiritual, it is not. The religion of the
Old Testament was not mere legalism; if it had been, the Old Testament
would be for us an unprofitable and almost an unintelligible book.
That religion had its spiritual side, as all but utterly corrupt
religions always have; God administered His grace to His people
through it, and in psalms and prophecies we have records of their
experiences, which are not legal, but spiritual, and priceless even to
Christian men. Nor would Paul, under other circumstances, have refused
to admit this; on the contrary, it is a prominent element in his
teaching. He knows that the old bears in its bosom the promise of the
new, a sum of promises that has been confirmed and made good in Jesus
Christ (chap. i. 20). He knows that the righteousness of God, which is
proclaimed in the Gospel, is witnessed to by the law and the prophets
(Rom. iii. 21). He knows that "the law," even, is "spiritual" (Rom.
vii. 14). He knows that the righteousness of faith was a secret
revealed to David (Rom. iv. 6 f.). He would probably have agreed with
Stephen that the oracles received and delivered by Moses in the
wilderness were "living" oracles; and his profound mind would have
thrilled to hear that great word of Jesus, "I am not come to destroy,
but to fulfil." Had he lived to a time like ours, when the Gospel also
has been embodied in a book, instead of using "letter" and "spirit" as
mutually exclusive, he would have admitted, as we do, that both ideas
apply, in some sense, to both dispensations, and that it is possible
to take the old and the new alike either in the letter or in the
spirit. Nevertheless, he would have been entitled to say that, if they
were to be characterised in their differences, they must be
characterised as he has done it: the mark of the old, as opposed to
the new, is literalism, or legalism; the mark of the new, as opposed
to the old, is spirituality, or freedom. They differ as law differs
from life, as compulsion from inspiration. Taken thus, no one can
have any difficulty in agreeing with him.
But the Apostle does not rest in generalities: he goes on to a more
particular comparison of the old and the new dispensations, and
especially to a demonstration that the new is the more glorious. He
starts with a statement of their working, as dependent on their nature
just described. One is letter; the other, spirit. Well, the letter
kills, but the spirit gives life. A sentence so pregnant as this, and
so capable of various applications, must have been very perplexing to
the Corinthians, had they not been fairly acquainted beforehand with
the Apostle's "form of doctrine" (Rom. vi. 17). It condenses in itself
a whole cycle of his characteristic thoughts. All that he says in the
Epistles to the Romans and the Galatians about the working of the law,
in its relation to the flesh, is represented in "the letter killeth."
The power of the law to create the consciousness of sin and to
intensify it; to stimulate transgression, and so make sin exceeding
sinful, and shut men up in despair; to pass sentence upon the guilty,
the hopeless sentence of death,--all this is involved in the words.
The fulness of meaning is as ample in "the spirit giveth life." The
Spirit of Christ, given to those who receive Christ in the Gospel, is
an infinite power and an infinite promise. It includes the reversal of
all that the letter has wrought. The sentence of death is reversed;
the impotence to good is counteracted and overcome; the soul looks out
to, and anticipates, not the blackness of darkness for ever, but the
everlasting glory of Christ.[26] When the Apostle has written these
two little sentences--when he has supplied "letter" and "spirit" with
the predicates "kill" and "make alive," in the sense which they bear
in the Christian revelation--he has gone as far as the mind of man can
go in stating an effective contrast. But he works it out with
reference to some special points in which the superiority of the new
to the old is to be observed.
(1) In the first place, the ministry of the old was a ministry of death.
Even as such it had a glory, or splendour, of its own. The face of
Moses, its great minister, shone after he had been in the presence of
God; and though that brightness was passing away even as men caught
sight of it (τὴν καταργουμένην is partic. impf.), it was so resplendent
as to dazzle the beholders. But the ministry of the new is a ministry of
spirit: and who would not argue _a fortiori_ that it should appear in
glory greater still? Both the μᾶλλον ("rather"), and the future (ἔσται),
in ver. 8, are logical. Paul speaks, to use Bengel's expression, looking
forward as it were from the Old Testament into the New. He does not say
in what the glory of the new consists. He does not say that it is
veiled at present, and will be manifested when Christ comes to
transfigure His own. Even the use of "hope" in ver. 12 does not prove
this. He leaves it quite indefinite; and arguing from the nature of the
two ministries, which has just been explained, simply concludes that in
glory the new must far transcend the old.
(2) In vv. 9 and 10 he puts a new point upon this. "Death" and "life"
are here replaced by "condemnation" and "righteousness." It is through
condemnation that man becomes the prey of death; and the grace which
reigns in him to eternal life reigns through righteousness (Rom. v.
21). The contrast of these two words is very significant for Paul's
conception of the Gospel: it shows how essential to his idea of
righteousness, how fundamental in it, is the thought of acquittal or
acceptance with God. Men are bad men, sinful men, under God's
condemnation; and he cannot conceive a Gospel at all which does not
announce, at the very outset, the removal of that condemnation, and a
declaration in the sinner's favour. Perhaps there are other ways of
conceiving men, and other aspects in which God can come to them as
their Saviour; but the Pauline Gospel has proved itself, and will
always prove itself anew, the Gospel for the sinful, who know the
misery of condemnation and despair. Mere pardon, as it has been
called, may be a meagre conception, but it is that without which no
other Christian conception can exist for a moment. That which lies at
the bottom of the new covenant, and supports all its magnificent
promises and hopes, is this: "I will forgive their iniquities, and I
will remember their sins no more." If we could imagine this taken
away, what were left? Of course the righteousness which the Gospel
proclaims _is_ more than pardon; it is not exhausted when we say it is
the opposite of condemnation; but unless we feel that the very nerve
of it lies in the removal of condemnation, we shall never understand
the New Testament tone in speaking of it. It is this which explains
the joyous rebound of the Apostle's spirit whenever he encounters the
subject; he remembers the black cloud, and now there is clear shining;
he was under sentence then, but now he is justified by faith, and has
peace with God. He cannot exaggerate the contrast, nor the greater
glory of the new state. Granting that the ministry of condemnation had
its glory--that the revelation of law "had an austere majesty of its
own"--does not the ministry of righteousness, the Gospel which
annulled the condemnation and restored man to peace with God, overflow
with glory? When he thinks of it, he is tempted to withdraw the
concession he has made. We may call the old dispensation and its
ministry glorious if we like; they are glorious when they stand alone;
but when comparison is made with the new,[27] they are not glorious at
all. The stars are bright till the moon rises; the moon herself reigns
in heaven till her splendour pales before the sun; but when the sun
shines in his strength, there is no other glory in the sky. All the
glories of the old covenant have vanished for Paul in the light which
shines from the Cross and from the Throne of Christ.
(3) A final superiority belongs to the new dispensation and its
ministry as compared with the old--the superiority of permanence to
transiency. "If that which passeth away _was_ with glory, much more
that which remaineth _is_ in glory." The verbs here are supplied by
the translators, but one may question whether the contrast of past and
present was so definite in the Apostle's mind. I think not, and the
reference to Moses' face does not prove that it was. All through these
comparisons St. Paul expresses himself with the utmost generality;
logical and ideal, not temporal, relations, dominate his thoughts. The
law _was_ given in glory (ἐγενήθη ἐν δόξῃ, ver. 7)--there is no
dispute about that; but what the eleventh verse makes prominent is
that while glory is the attendant or accompaniment of the transient,
it is the element of the permanent. The law is indeed of God; it has a
function in the economy of God; it is at the very lowest a negative
preparation for the Gospel; it shuts men up to the acceptance of God's
mercy. In this respect the glory on Moses' face represents the real
greatness which belongs to the law as a power used by God in the
working out of His loving purpose. But at the best the law only shuts
men up to Christ, and then its work is done. The true greatness of God
is revealed, and with it His true glory, once for all, in the Gospel.
There is nothing beyond the righteousness of God, manifested in Christ
Jesus, for the acceptance of faith. That is God's last word to the
world: it has absorbed in it even the glory of the law; and it is
bright for ever with a glory above all other. It is God's chief end to
reveal this glory in the Gospel, and to make men partakers of it; it
has been so always, is so still, and ever shall be; and in the
consciousness that he has seen and been saved by the eternal love of
God, and is now a minister of it, the Apostle claims this finality of
the new covenant as its crowning glory. The law, like the lower gifts
of the Christian life, passes away; but the new covenant abides, for
it is the revelation of love--that love which is the being and the
glory of God Himself.
These qualities of the Christian dispensation, which constitute its
newness, are too readily lost sight of. It is hard to appreciate and
to live up to them, and hence they are always lapsing out of view, and
requiring to be rediscovered. In the first age of Christianity there
were many myriads of Jews, the Book of Acts tells us, who had very
little sense of the newness of the Gospel; they were exceedingly
zealous for the law, even for the letter of all its ritual
prescriptions: Paul and his spiritual conception of Christianity were
their bugbear. In the first half of the second century the religion
even of the Gentile Churches had already become more legal than
evangelical; there was wanting any sufficient apprehension of the
spirituality, the freedom, and the newness of Christianity as opposed
to Judaism; and though the reaction of Marcion, who denied that there
was any connexion whatever between the Old Testament and the New, went
to a false and perverse extreme, it was the natural, and in its
motives the legitimate, protest of spirit and life against letter and
law. The Reformation in the sixteenth century was essentially a
movement of similar character: it was the rediscovery of the Pauline
Gospel, or of the Gospel in those characteristics of it which made
Paul's heart leap for joy--its justifying righteousness, its
spirituality, its liberty. In a Protestant scholasticism this glorious
Gospel has again been lost oftener than once; it is lost when "a
learned ministry" deals with the New Testament writings as the scribes
dealt with the Old; it is lost also--for extremes meet--when an
unlearned piety swears by verbal, even by literal, inspiration, and
takes up to mere documents an attitude which in principle is fatal to
Christianity. It is in the life of the Church--especially in that life
which communicates itself, and makes the Christian community what the
Jewish never was, essential a missionary community--that the safeguard
of all these high characteristics lies. A Church devoted to learning,
or to the maintenance of a social or political position, or even
merely to the cultivation of a type of character among its own
members, may easily cease to be spiritual, and lapse into legal
religion: a Church actively engaged propagating itself never can. It
is not with the "letter" one can hopefully address unbelieving men; it
is only with the power of the Holy Spirit at work in the heart; and
where the Spirit is, there is liberty. None are so "sound" on the
essentials of the faith as men with the truly missionary spirit; but
at the same time none are so completely emancipated, and that by the
self-same Spirit, from all that is not itself spiritual.
FOOTNOTES:
[24] The true reading in Matt. xxvi. 28 omits "new," but the reference
is unmistakable.
[25] Grammatically, it is probable that γράμματος and πνεύματος in ver.
6 depend, not on διαθήκης, but on διακόνους; but the sense is all one.
[26] The contrast of "letter" and "spirit" has, as is well known, been
taken in various ways. That which is given above undoubtedly
represents St. Paul's mind, and may be called the historical
interpretation. An interpretation so common in early times that it
might fairly be called the patristic, would explain the words as
meaning that the _literal_ sense of the Scriptures, especially of the
Old Testament, is fatally misleading, and that we must find what that
literal sense represents to the laws of allegory, if we would make it
a word of life (cf. in Rev. xi. 8, "the great city, which
_spiritually_ is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was
crucified"). There is another interpretation still, which may be
called the literary or practical one. According to this, the Apostle
means that the spiritual life, whether of intelligence or conscience,
is strangled by literalism; we must regard not words as such, but the
spirit and purpose of their author, if we are to have life and
progress. This is perfectly true, but perfectly irrelevant, and is a
good example of the free-and-easy way in which the Bible is quoted by
those who do not study it.
[27] Chrysostom explains ἑν τούτῳ τῷ μέρει by κατὰ τὸν τῆς συγκρίσεως
λόγον, and this is substantially right. But I think the words merely
anticipate ἑίνεκεν τῆς ὑπερβαλλούσης δόξης.
X
_THE TRANSFIGURING SPIRIT_