and _are_ not as Moses, _who_ put a veil upon his face, that the
children of Israel should not look stedfastly on the end of that
which was passing away: but their minds were hardened: for until
this very day at the reading of the old covenant the same veil
remaineth unlifted; which veil is done away in Christ. But unto
this day, whensoever Moses is read, a veil lieth upon their heart.
But whensoever it shall turn to the Lord, the veil is taken away.
Now the Lord is the Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is,
_there_ is liberty. But we all, with unveiled face reflecting as a
mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image
from glory to glory, even as from the Lord the Spirit."--2 COR.
iii. 12-18 (R.V.).
The "hope" which here explains the Apostle's freedom of speech is to all
intents and purposes the same as the "confidence" in ver. 4.[28] It is
much easier to suppose that the word is thus used, with a certain
latitude, as it might be in English, than to force upon it a reference
to the glory to be revealed when Christ comes again, and to give the
same future reference to "glory" all through this passage. The new
covenant is present, and present in its glory; and though it has a
future, with which the Apostle's hope is bound up, it is not in view of
its future only, it is because of what it is even now, that he is so
grandly confident, and uses such boldness of speech. It is quite fair to
infer from chap. iv. 3--"if our Gospel is veiled, it is veiled in those
that are perishing"--that Paul's opponents at Corinth had charged him
with behaviour of another kind. They had accused him of making a mystery
of his Gospel--preaching it in such a fashion that no one could really
see it, or understand what he meant. If there is any charge which the
true preacher will feel keenly, and resent vehemently, it is this. It is
his first duty to deliver his message with a plainness that defies
misunderstanding. He is sent to all men on an errand of life or death;
and to leave any man wondering, after the message has been delivered,
what it is about, is the worst sort of treachery. It belies the Gospel,
and God who is its author. It may be due to pride, or to a misguided
intention to commend the Gospel to the wisdom or the prejudices of men;
but it is never anything else than a fatal mistake.
Paul not only resents the charge; he feels it so acutely that he finds
an ingenious way of retorting it. "We," he says, "the ministers of the
new covenant, we who preach life, righteousness, and everlasting
glory, have nothing to hide; we wish every one to know everything
about the dispensation which we serve. It is the representatives of
the old who are really open to the charge of using concealment; the
first and the greatest of them all, Moses himself, put a veil on his
face, that[29] the children of Israel should not look stedfastly on
the end of that which was passing away. The glory on his face was a
fading glory, because it was the glory of a temporary dispensation;
but he did not wish the Israelites to see clearly that it was destined
to disappear; so he veiled his face, and left them to think the law a
permanent divine institution."
Perhaps the best thing to do with this singular interpretation is not
to take it too seriously. Even sober expositors like Chrysostom and
Calvin have thought it necessary to argue gravely that the Apostle is
not accusing the law, or saying anything insulting of Moses; while
Schmiedel, on the other hand, insists that a grave moral charge _is_
made against Moses, and that Paul most unjustly uses the Old
Testament, in its own despite, to prove its own transitoriness. I
believe it would be far truer to say that the character of Moses never
crossed Paul's mind in the whole passage, for better or worse; he only
remembered, as he smarted under the accusation of veiling his Gospel
of the new covenant, a certain transaction under the old covenant in
which a veil did figure--a transaction which a Rabbinical
interpretation, whimsical indeed to us, but provoking if not
convincing to his adversaries, enabled him to turn against them. As
for proving the transitoriness of the Old Testament by a forced and
illegitimate argument, that transitoriness was abundantly established
to Paul, as it is to us, on real grounds; nothing whatever depends on
what is here said of Moses and the veil. It is not necessary, if we
take this view, to go into the historical interpretation of the
passage in Exod. xxxiv. 29-35. The comparison of the Apostle with the
Old Testament writer has been made more difficult for the English
reader by the serious error in the Authorised Version of Exod. xxxiv.
33. Instead of "_till_ Moses had done speaking with them," we ought to
read, as in the Revised Version, "_when_ Moses had done speaking."
This exactly reverses the meaning. Moses spoke to the people with face
bare and radiant; the glory was to be visible at least in his official
intercourse with them, or _whenever he spoke for God_. At other times
he wore the veil, putting it off, however, when he went into the
tabernacle--that is, _whenever he spoke with God_. In all divine
relations, then, we should naturally infer, there was to be the open
and shining face; in other words, so far as he acted as mediator of
the old covenant, Moses really acted in the spirit of Paul. It would
therefore have been unjust in the Apostle to charge him with hiding
anything, if the charge had really meant more than this--that Paul saw
in his use of the veil a symbol of the fact that the children of
Israel did not see that the old covenant was transitory, and that its
glory was to be lost in that of the new. No one can deny that this
_was_ the fact, and no one therefore need be exercised if Paul
pictured it in the manner of his own time and race, and not in the
manner of ours. To suppose that he means to charge Moses with a
deliberate act of dishonesty is to suppose what no sensible person
will ever credit; and we may return, without more ado, to the painful
situation which he contemplates.
_Their minds were hardened._ This is stated historically, and seems to
refer in the first instance to those who watched Moses put on the
veil, and became insensible, as he did so, to the nature of the old
covenant. But it is applicable to the Jewish race at all periods of
their history; they never discovered the secret which Moses hid from
their forefathers beneath the veil. The only result that followed the
labours even of great prophets like Isaiah had been the deepening of
the darkness; having eyes the people saw not, having ears they heard
not; their heart was fat and heavy, so that they did not apprehend the
ways of God nor turn to Him. All around him the Apostle saw the
melancholy evidence that there had been no change for the better.
Until this day the same veil remains, when the Old Testament is
read,[30] not taken away; for it is only undone in Christ, and of
Christ they will know nothing. He repeats the sad statement, varying
it slightly to indicate that the responsibility for a condition so
blind and dreary rests not with the old covenant itself, but with
those who live under it. "Until this day, I say, whensoever Moses is
read, a veil lies upon their heart."
This witness, we must acknowledge, is almost as true in the nineteenth
century as in the first. The Jews still exist as a race and a sect,
acknowledging the Old Testament as a revelation from God, basing their
religion upon it, keeping their ancient law so far as circumstances
enable them to keep it, not convinced that as a religious constitution
it has been superseded by a new one. Many of them, indeed, have
abandoned it without becoming Christians. But in so doing they have
become secularists; they have not appreciated the old covenant to the
full, and then outgrown it; they have been led for various reasons to
deny that there ever was anything divine in it, and have renounced
together its discipline and its hopes. Only where the knowledge of the
Christ has been received is the veil which lies upon their hearts
taken away; they can then appreciate both all the virtues of the
ancient dispensation and all its defects; they can glorify God for
what it was and for what it shut them up to; they can see that in all
its parts it had a reference to something lying beyond itself--to a
"new thing" that God would do for His people; and in welcoming the new
covenant, and its Mediator Jesus Christ, they can feel that they are
not making void, but establishing, the law.
This is their hope, and to this the Apostle looks in ver. 16: "But
whensoever it shall turn to the Lord, the veil is taken away." The
Greek expression of this passage is so closely modelled on that of
Exod. xxxiv. 34, that Westcott and Hort print it as a quotation. Moses
evidently is still in the Apostle's mind. The veiling of his face
symbolised the nation's blindness; the nation's hope is to be seen in
that action in which Moses was unveiled. He uncovered his face when he
turned from the people to speak to God. "Even so," says the Apostle,
"when _they_ turn to the Lord, the veil of which we have been speaking
is taken away,[31] and they see clearly."[32] One can hardly avoid
feeling in this a reminiscence of the Apostle's own conversion. He is
thinking not only of the unveiling of Moses, but of the scales which
fell from his own eyes when he was baptised in the name of Jesus, and
was filled with the Holy Ghost, and saw the old covenant and its glory
lost and fulfilled in the new. He knew how stupendous was the change
involved here; it meant a revolution in the whole constitution of the
Jews' spiritual world as vast as that which was wrought in the natural
world when the sun supplanted the earth as the centre of our system.
But the gain was corresponding. The soul was delivered from an
_impasse_. Under the old covenant, as bitter experience had shown him,
the religious life had come to a dead-lock; the conscience was
confronted with a torturing, and in its very nature insoluble,
problem: man, burdened and enslaved by sin, was required to attain to
a righteousness which should please God. The contradictions of this
position were solved, its mystery was abolished, when the soul turned
to the Lord, and appropriated by faith the righteousness and life of
God in him. The old covenant found its place, an intelligible and
worthy though subordinate place, in the grand programme of redemption;
the strife between the soul and God, between the soul and the
conditions of existence, ceased; life opened out again; there was a
large room to move in, an inspiring power within; in one word, there
was spiritual life and liberty, and Christ was the author of it all.
This is the force of the seventeenth verse: "Now the Lord is the
Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." The
Lord, of course, is Christ, and the Spirit is that of which Paul has
already spoken in the sixth verse. It is the Holy Spirit, the Lord
and Giver of life under the new covenant. He who turns to Christ
receives this Spirit; it is through it that Christ dwells in His
people; what are called "fruits of the Spirit" are traits of Christ's
own character which the Spirit produces in the saints; practically,
therefore, the two may be identified, and hence the expression "the
Lord is the Spirit," though startling at first sight, is not improper,
and ought not to mislead.[33] It is a mistake to connect it with such
passages as Rom. i. 4, and to draw inferences from it as to Paul's
conception of the person of Christ. He does not say "the Lord is
spirit," but "the Lord is the Spirit"; what is in view is not the
person of Christ so much as His power. To identify the Lord and the
Spirit without qualification, in the face of the benediction in chap.
xiii. 14, is out of the question. The truth of the passage is the same
as that of Rom. viii. 9 ff.: "If any man have not _the Spirit of
Christ_, he is none of His. And if _Christ is in you_," etc. Here, so
far as the practical experience of Christians goes, no distinction is
made between the Spirit of Christ and Christ Himself; Christ dwells in
Christians through His Spirit. The very same truth, as is well known,
pervades the chapters in the Fourth Gospel in which Christ consoles
His disciples for His departure from this world; He will not leave
them orphans--He will come to them, and remain with them in the other
Comforter. To turn to Christ, the Apostle wishes to assert with the
utmost emphasis, is not to do a thing which has no virtue and no
consequences; it is to turn to one who has received of the Father the
gift of the Holy Ghost, and who immediately sets up the new spiritual
life, which is nothing less than His own life, by that Spirit, in the
believing soul. And summing up in one word the grand characteristic
and distinction of the new covenant, as realised by this indwelling of
Christ through His Spirit, he concludes: "And where the Spirit of the
Lord is, there is liberty."
In the interpretation of the last word, we must have respect to the
context; liberty has its meaning in contrast with that state to which
the old covenant had reduced those who adhered to it. It means freedom
from the law; freedom, fundamentally, from its condemnation, thanks to
the gift of righteousness in Christ; freedom, also, from its letter,
as something simply without us and over against us. No written word,
as such, can ever be pleaded against the voice of the Spirit within.
Even the words we call in an eminent sense "inspired," words of the
Spirit, are subject to this law: they do not put a limit to the
liberty of the spiritual man. He can overrule the letter of them when
the literal interpretation or application would contravene the spirit
which is common both to them and him. This principle is capable of
being abused, no doubt, and by bad men and fanatics has been abused;
but its worst abuses can hardly have done more harm than the pedantic
word-worship which has often lost the soul even of the New Testament,
and read the words of the Lord and His Apostles with a veil upon its
face through which nothing could be seen. There is such a thing as an
unspiritual scrupulosity in dealing with the New Testament, now that
we have it in documentary form, just as there used to be in dealing
with the Old; and we ought to remind ourselves continually that the
documentary form is an accident, not an essential, of the new
covenant. That covenant existed, and men lived under it and enjoyed
its blessings, before it had any written documents at all; and we
shall not appreciate its characteristics, and especially this one of
its spiritual freedom, unless we put ourselves occasionally, in
imagination, in their place. It is far easier to make Paul mean too
little than too much; and the liberty of the Spirit in which he exults
here covers, we may be sure, not only liberty from condemnation, and
liberty from the unspiritual yoke of the ritual law, but liberty from
all that is in its nature statutory, liberty to organise the new life,
and to legislate for it, from within.
The bearing of this passage on the religious blindness of the Jews
ought not to hide from us its permanent application. The religious
insensibility of his countrymen will cease, Paul says; their religious
perplexities will be solved, when they turn to Christ. This is the
beginning of all intelligence, of all freedom, of all hope, in things
spiritual. Much of the religious doubt and confusion of our own times
is due to the preoccupation of men's minds with religion at points
from which Christ is invisible. But it is He who is the key to _all_
human experiences as well as to the Old Testament; it is He who
answers the questions of the world as well as the questions of the
Jews; it is He who takes _our_ feet out of the net, opens the gate of
righteousness before us, and gives us spiritual freedom. It is like
finding a pearl of great price when the soul discovers this, and to
point it out to others is to do them a priceless service. Disregard
everything else in the meantime, if you are bewildered, baffled, in
bonds which you cannot break; turn to Jesus Christ, as Moses turned to
God, with face uncovered; put down prejudice, preconceptions, pride,
the disposition to make demands; only look stedfastly till you see
what He is, and all that perplexes you will pass away, or appear in a
new light, and serve a new and spiritual purpose.
Something like this larger application of his words passed, we may
suppose, before the Apostle's mind when he wrote the eighteenth verse.
In the grandeur of the truth which rises upon him he forgets his
controversy and becomes a poet. We breathe the ampler ether, the diviner
air, as we read: "But we all, with unveiled face beholding as in a glass
the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to
glory, even as from the Lord the Spirit." I have kept here for
κατοπτριζόμενοι the rendering of the Authorised Version, which in the
Revised has been relegated to the margin, and replaced by "reflecting as
a mirror." There do not seem to be sufficient grounds for the change,
and the old translation is defended in Grimm's Lexicon, in Winer's
Grammar, and by Meyer, Heinrici, and Beet. The active voice of the verb
κατοπτρίζω means "to exhibit in a mirror"; and the middle, "to mirror
oneself"--_i.e._, "to look at oneself in a mirror." This, at least, is
the sense of most of the examples of the middle which are found in Greek
writers; but as it is quite inapplicable here, the question of
interpretation becomes rather difficult. It is, however, in accordance
with analogy to say that if the active means "to show in a mirror," the
middle means "to get shown to one in a mirror," or, as the Authorised
Version puts it, "to behold in a mirror." I cannot make out that any
analogy favours the new rendering, "reflecting as a mirror"; and the
authority of Chrysostom, which would otherwise be considerable on this
side, is lessened by the fact that he seems never to have raised the
question, and in point of fact combines both renderings.[34] His
illustration of the polished silver lying in the sunshine, and sending
back the rays which strike it, is in favour of the change; but when he
writes, "We not only _look upon_ the glory of God, but also catch thence
a kind of radiance," he may fairly be claimed for the other side. There
are two reasons also which seem to me to have great weight in favour of
the old rendering: first, the expression "with unveiled face," which, as
Meyer remarks, is naturally of a piece with "beholding"; and, second, an
unequivocal example of the middle voice of κατοπτρίζομαι in the sense of
"seeing," while no unequivocal example can be produced for "reflecting."
This example is found in Philo i. 107 (_Leg. Alleg._, iii. 33), where
Moses prays to God: "Show not Thyself to me through heaven or earth, or
water or air, or anything at all that comes into being; nor let me see
Thy form mirrored in any other thing than in Thee, even in God" (Μηδὲ
κατοπτρισαίμην ἐν ἄλλῳ τινὶ τὴν σὴν ἰδέαν ἢ ἐν σοὶ τῷ Θεῷ). This seems
to me decisive, and there is the less reason to reject it on other than
linguistic grounds, when we consider that the idea of "reflecting," if
it is given up in κατοπτριζόμενοι, is conserved in μεταμορφούμεθα. The
transformation has the reflection of Christ's glory for its effect, not
for its cause; but the reflection, eventually, is there.
Assuming, then, that "beholding as in a glass" is the right
interpretation of this hard word, let us go on to what the Apostle
says. "We all" probably means "all Christians," and not only "all
Christian teachers." If there is a comparison implied, it is between
the two dispensations, and the experiences open to those who lived
under them, not between the mediator of the old and the heralds of the
new. Under the old covenant one only saw the glory; now the beatific
vision is open to all. We all behold it "with unveiled face." There is
nothing on Christ's part that leads to disguise, and nothing on ours
that comes between us and Him. The darkness is past, the true light
already shines, and Christian souls cannot look on it too fixedly, or
drink it in to excess. But what is meant by "the glory of the Lord" on
which we gaze with face unveiled?
It will not be questioned, by those who are at home in St. Paul's
thoughts, that "the Lord" means the exalted Saviour, and that the
glory must be something which belongs to Him. Indeed, if we remember
that in the First Epistle, chap. ii. 8, He is characteristically
described by the Apostle as "the Lord of glory," we shall not feel it
too much to say that the glory is _everything_ which belongs to Him.
There is not any aspect of the exalted Christ, there is not any
representation of Him in the Gospel, there is not any function which
He exercises, that does not come under this head. "In His temple
everything saith Glory!" There is a glory even in the mode of His
existence: St. Paul's conception of Him is dominated always by that
appearance on the way to Damascus, when he saw the Christ through a
light above the brightness of the sun. It is His glory that He shares
the Father's throne,[35] that He is head of the Church, possessor and
bestower of all the fulness of divine grace, the coming Judge of the
world, conqueror of every hostile power, intercessor for His own,
and, in short, bearer of all the majesty which belongs to His kingly
office. The essential thing in all this--essential to the
understanding of the Apostle, and to the existence of the apostolic
"_Gospel of the glory of Christ_" (chap. iv. 4)--is that the glory in
question is the glory of a Living Person. When Paul thinks of it, he
does not look back, he looks up; he does not remember, he beholds in a
glass; the glory of the Lord has no meaning for him apart from the
present exaltation of the Risen Christ. "The Lord reigneth; He is
apparelled with majesty"--that is the anthem of His praise.
I have insisted on this, because, in a certain reaction from what was
perhaps an exaggerated Paulinism, there is a tendency to misapply even
the most characteristic and vital passages in St. Paul's Gospel, and
pre-eminently to misapply passages like this. Nothing could be more
misleading than to substitute here for the glory of the exalted Christ
as mirrored in the apostolic Gospel that moral beauty which was seen
in Jesus of Nazareth. Of course I do not mean to deny that the moral
loveliness of Jesus is glorious; nor do I question that in the
contemplation of it in the pages of our Gospels--_subject to one grand
condition_--a transforming power is exercised through it; but I do
deny that any such thing was in the mind of St. Paul. The subject of
the Apostle's Gospel was not Jesus the carpenter of Nazareth, but
Christ the Lord of glory; men, as he understood the matter, were
saved, not by dwelling on the wonderful words and deeds of One who had
lived some time ago, and reviving these in their imagination, but by
receiving the almighty, emancipating, quickening Spirit of One who
lived and reigned for evermore. The transformation here spoken of is
not the work of a powerful imagination, which can make the figure in
the pages of the Gospels live again, and suffuse the soul with feeling
as it gazes upon it; preach this as gospel who will, it was never
preached by an apostle of Jesus Christ. It is the work of the Spirit,
and the Spirit is given, not to the memory or imagination which can
vivify the past, but to the faith which sees Christ upon His throne.
_And it is subject to the condition of faith in the living Christ that
contemplation of Jesus in the Gospels changes us into the same image._
There can be no doubt that at the present time many are falling back
upon this contemplation in a despairing rather than a believing mood;
what they seek and find in it is rather a poetic consolation than
religious inspiration; their faith in the living Christ is gone, or is
so uncertain as to be practically of no saving power, and they have
recourse to the memory of what Jesus was as at least something to
cling to. "We thought that it had been He which should have delivered
Israel." But surely it is as clear as day that in religion--in the
matter of redemption--we must deal, not with the dead, but with the
living. Paul may have known less or more of the contents of our first
three Gospels; he may have valued them more or less adequately; but
just because he had been saved by Christ, and was preaching Christ as
a Saviour, the centre of his thoughts and affections was not Galilee,
but "the heavenlies." _There_ the Lord of glory reigned; and from that
world He sent the Spirit which changed His people into His image. And
so it must always be, if Christianity is to be a living religion.
Leave out this, and not only is the Pauline Gospel lost, but
everything is lost which could be called Gospel in the New Testament.