Produced by Al Haines
_St. Paul's_
_Epistle to the Romans_
_A Practical Exposition_
BY THE
RIGHT REV. CHARLES GORE, D.D.
LORD BISHOP OF WORCESTER
VOL. I
(CHAPTERS I-VIII)
LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
1902
FIRST EDITION . _February_, 1899.
_Reprinted . . . . . March_, 1900.
_Reprinted . . . September_, 1900.
_Reprinted . . . . October_, 1902.
OXFORD
HORACE HART, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY
{v}
PREFACE
A good excuse is needed for adding to the large number of excellent
commentaries on the Epistle to the Romans which already exist. But I
think there is such an excuse. These commentaries are not of the sort
which readers who are educated but not scholarly find it easy to
master; so that in fact this epistle is at the present day very much
misunderstood or ignored by such people. And again, partly owing to
its interpretation at the period of the Reformation and by some
Evangelicals of later date, it is still practically to a great extent
viewed with discomfort and neglected by those who most value the name
of Catholic. My excuse, then, for adding to the expositions of the
Romans lies in these facts. One who is necessarily immersed in the
practical work of the Christian ministry, and is yet struggling to keep
himself in some sense in line with biblical scholarship, if his life
involves special disadvantages, may yet hope to be useful in
interpreting to ordinary Christians {vi} the results of the scholars.
And I am persuaded that it requires one who enters thoroughly into the
spirit of churchmanship, or the obligation of the one body, to
interpret with any completeness the mind of St. Paul.
This volume has practically no more connexion with lectures delivered
in Westminster Abbey last Lent, than is implied in its being an
exposition of the same epistle by the same person.
The method of exposition in this volume is the same as that pursued in
its predecessor on the Epistle to the Ephesians. After a general
introduction, each section of the Revised Version is taken, or in some
cases two sections are taken together, and prefaced by an analysis or
paraphrase, as seems most useful, and followed by further explanation
of the main ideas or phrases which each section contains.
The 'appended notes' I have been obliged to defer to the end of the
second volume--which, I hope, will appear within a year--with a view of
approximately equalizing the size of the two volumes.
CHARLES GORE.
WESTMINSTER ABBEY,
_Conversion of St. Paul_, 1899.
{vii}
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION.
(i) Origin and circumstances of the epistle . . . . . . . . 1
(ii) 'Justification by works' or 'by faith' . . . . . . . . 6
(iii) Justification, sanctification, and Church membership . 25
(iv) St. Paul's doctrine and modern spiritual needs . . . . 41
THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS.
CHAPTER
I. 1-7 SALUTATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
8-17 INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
DIVISION I _Universality of sin and condemnation_ . . . . . . . 63
18-32 Sec. 1 Judgement on the Gentile world . . . . . . . . 66
II. Sec. 2 Judgement on the Jews . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
III. 1-8 Sec. 3 Jewish objections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
9-20 Sec. 4 Sin and condemnation universal . . . . . . . . 121
DIVISION II _Justification by faith only_.
21-31 Sec. 1 Christ our propitiation . . . . . . . . . . . . 130
IV. Sec. 2 The true seed of Abraham . . . . . . . . . . . 155
{viii}
DIVISION III _The accepted life or the moral consequences
of justification_.
V. 1-11 Sec. 1 The holy confidence of the justified . . . . . 175
12-21 Sec. 2 The second Adam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
VI. 1-14 Sec. 3 The Christian life a living by dying . . . . . 204
15-23 Sec. 4 The perfect freedom in God's service . . . . . 225
VII. 1-6 Sec. 5 Freedom from the law by union with Christ . . 236
7-25 Sec. 6 The function and failure of the law . . . . . 245
VIII. 1-11 Sec. 7 Life in the Spirit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271
12-17 Sec. 8 The life of sonship . . . . . . . . . . . . . 288
18-30 Sec. 9 The hope of the creation . . . . . . . . . . . 298
31-39 Sec. 10 Christian assurance . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321
{1}
THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS
_Introduction._
i.
St. Paul's great Epistle to the Romans was written, as may be quite
confidently asserted, from Corinth, during the second visit to Greece
recorded in the Acts[1], i.e. in the beginning of the year commonly
reckoned 58, but perhaps more correctly 56 A.D.--the year following the
writing of the Epistles to the Corinthians. The reasons for this
confident statement, and indeed for all that needs to be said about the
circumstances under which St. Paul wrote and the conditions of
Christianity at Rome, become apparent chiefly in connexion with the
later parts of the epistle which are not included in this volume. They
{2} shall therefore be omitted here, and we will content ourselves for
the moment with a very brief statement of the results in which scholars
are now finding, as it would seem, final agreement.
The existence of Christians at Rome was due not to any apostolic
founding, for no apostle appears yet to have visited Rome, but to the
sort of 'quiet and fortuitous filtration[2]' of Christians from various
parts of the empire to its great centre which must naturally have taken
place; for from all quarters there was a tendency to Rome. 'Some from
Palestine, some from Corinth, some from Ephesus and other parts of
Proconsular Asia, possibly some from Tarsus, and more from the Syrian
Antioch, there was in the first instance, as we may believe, nothing
concerted in their going; but when once they arrived in the metropolis,
the freemasonry common among Christians would soon make them known to
each other, and they would form, not exactly an organized Church'--that
may well have been the result of the later presence of St. Paul and St.
Peter--'but such a fortuitous assemblage of Christians as was {3} only
waiting for the advent of an apostle to constitute one[3].' Among this
assemblage of Christians it appears evident from St. Paul's language[4]
that there must have been Jews as well as Gentiles; but the dominant
character of the church was Gentile[5]. It is perhaps only putting
this in another way to say that there would have been among the Roman
Christians elements of hostility to St. Paul and his teaching, but
Christianity as St. Paul taught it would have been in the ascendant.
And probably St. Paul's special informants about affairs there would
have been his special friends, Prisca and Aquila[6].
The character of the epistle written to these Christians of the capital
is marked. It has beyond any other of St. Paul's epistles the
character of an ordered theological treatise. Of course it assumes the
existence of accepted Christian principles--the rudimentary instruction
or Christian 'tradition'--in the minds of those to whom it was
addressed[7]. But it takes certain of these principles of the
Christian {4} religion and develops them systematically and
argumentatively; though again, it must be explained, the argument is
very far from being barely logical, but is full of the deepest feeling,
showing itself in passages of memorable eloquence which live in the
hearts of all of us.
Why this particular epistle should have this character of a systematic
treatise is not hard to see. St. Paul was reaching the end of his
great controversy for the catholicity of the Gospel, against the
Judaizers--that is, for the equal position of Gentiles and Jews in the
Church, and against the obligation upon the Gentiles of circumcision
and the ceremonial law. That controversy was the occasion of the
apostolic conference at Jerusalem, which is described both by St. Luke
in the Acts[8] and, from the point of view of St. Paul's own 'apology,'
in the Epistle to the Galatians[9]. It is felt at its whitest heat in
that intensely concentrated and passionate epistle. But by the time
that the Epistle to the Romans came to be written the controversy was
quieting down. The victory of Catholicism over Judaism was as good as
won. The great principle of justification by faith, not by works of
the law, had developed itself lucidly {5} and clearly in St. Paul's
mind, and flowed out in our epistle in an ordered sequence of thought,
rich, profound, and mature.
And there were special reasons why it should have been expressed in
writing at this moment, and to the Roman Christians. Though the heat
of the conflict inside the Church was over, the fierce hostility of
many of the Jews, both within and without the Church, to St. Paul
personally was by no means past. Now St. Paul was on his way up to
Jerusalem with the money collected in the Gentile churches for the poor
brethren there. He attached great importance to this expression of
Gentile goodwill, and almost more importance to its acceptance at his
hands by the Jerusalem Christians[10]. It was to be a link of mutual,
practical love to bind the divergent elements in the Church together.
But he felt, and as experience showed rightly, that his enterprise
would be attended with great peril to his life. This epistle
therefore, like his speech at Miletus, has something of the character
of 'last words[11].' He is in writing it committing to the future the
fruits of his labours, so far as they can be expressed in a doctrine,
at a moment when he feels that their continuance is being {6} seriously
imperilled. And this summary of his life's teaching in its most
characteristic aspect is most fitly addressed to the Christians of the
great city which was the centre of the then world. St. Paul already
conceived of Christianity as, in prospect at least, the religion of the
empire. It was vastly important, therefore, that the capital should
know it and hold it in its full glory and richness. He himself, if he
escaped safe through the visit to Jerusalem, was bent on immediately
going thither and securing this great end by his personal ministry[12].
But he could not depend on the future. He must seize the golden
moment--buying up the opportunity at least by a letter.
This, in very brief words, is an account of the circumstances and
conditions under which the Epistle to the Romans was written, and it
must suffice for the moment till some of the details are presented to
us in its later chapters.
ii.
There are men of whom it is especially true that their teaching is the
outcome of their own {7} personal experience. If a man's teaching is
to have any real force this must be in a measure true in any case. But
in some men the personal experience has set an exceptionally strong
impress upon the intellectual convictions, and so upon the teaching.
Such men--otherwise very different from one another--are Augustine,
Dante, Luther, Bunyan, Newman. Such an one was St. Paul. His
intellectual theory is on fire with the emotions bred of a personal
experience, both bitter and sweet, but always intense. And if there is
professedly more of autobiography in the Epistle to the Galatians, yet
in fact we know St. Paul's interior life, both before and after his
'conversion,' so far as we know it at all, mainly through the
generalized account of it in the Epistle to the Romans. For the
doctrine of justification by faith, not by works of the law, developed
in this epistle, is the record of his personal experience reduced to a
general principle. St. Paul had, on the lines of his Pharisaic
education, in the first half of his life zealously sought to be
justified by works, and had found out his mistake.
What is the real meaning of this phrase? Ordinarily we Englishmen find
it natural to appropriate St. James' 'common sense' language {8} about
justification rather than St. Paul's[13], and say that faith is surely
of no moral value without works or good actions, and that we can be
justified by nothing else except our conduct. Or if the Pharisees are
pointed to with their rigid ecclesiastical observances as types of men
seeking to be justified before God by the merits of their works, then,
in this sense of works, we feel that the idea of justification by such
means, apart from deeper moral effort, is one which has passed out of
our horizon. Yet if we get to the moral essence of the Pharisaic idea,
we may still find it lying very close at hand to us, even though we do
not know what a phylactery means, and are at a safe distance from
fasting twice in the week, or giving tithes of all that we acquire. A
well-to-do Englishman, of whatever class, has a strong sense of
respectability. He has a code of duty and honour which he is at pains
to observe. A soldier, a gentleman, a woman of fashion, a peasant's
wife, a schoolboy, and an undergraduate, representing not more than the
average moral levels of their different classes, will all of them make
really great sacrifices to fulfil the requirements of their respective
codes. Their conscience requires {9} this of them, and they would be
miserable in falling short of it. But their conscience is also limited
to it. They resent the claim of a progressive morality. Conscientious
within the region of the traditional and the expected, they are often
almost impenetrable to light from beyond. They are nervously afraid of
the very idea of subjecting their life to a fundamental revision in the
light of Christ's claim, or to the idea of surrender to the divine
light wherever it may lead. But this frame of mind--conscientiousness
within a limited and well-established area accepted by public opinion,
coupled with resentment at whatever completer and diviner claim may
interfere to disconcert one's self-satisfaction, and bid one begin
afresh on a truer basis--is that very attempt to be justified by works
which appeared in the case of the Pharisees, only dressed in very
different guise to that in which the conditions of modern England
clothe it.
For the Pharisees of the Gospels were the later representatives of the
Hasidaeans, i.e. Chasidim or 'pious' folk, whom we hear of in the Books
of Maccabees[14]. The later religious development of Israel lay along
the lines of {10} rigid reverence for the law. In days then of general
laxity and a general prevalence of Greek customs, these pious
Israelites united themselves to promote the devout observance of their
law. Their relation to Maccabaean heroes and rulers varied, as
religious or political motives were uppermost in the Maccabaean house.
They themselves pursued one consistent aim. They came to be known as
the Pharisees, the separated or the separatists, the party who kept
aloof from everything common or unclean. As such they represented the
religious nation in its later development. They had the bulk of the
people, and especially the women, with them. They had consequently, as
Josephus tells us, an irresistible influence upon public affairs, and
especially upon religious affairs, and they held the social position
befitting the legitimate religious leaders of God's own people.
This position, with its accompanying reputation, they doubtless
deserved by their zeal for the law, and for the 'traditions of the
fathers' which hedged about or interpreted the law. But according to
the solemn witness of Christ and St. Paul, a disastrous lowering of the
best moral standard of the Old Testament scriptures had taken place
among them. The Mosaic law was, {11} of course, a matter mainly of
outward observance, and therefore would become a matter of rigid social
requirement within the area of such a body as the Pharisees. Nowhere
does public opinion act more strongly than in a close religious circle.
But the social requirement according to tradition came to be
substituted for that deeper spiritual relation of the 'holy nation' and
the individuals composing it to God and His will, which is the real
moral essence of the Old Testament. 'How can ye believe,' our Lord
said to them, 'which receive glory one of another, and the glory that
cometh from the only God ye seek not[15]?' This is the central moral
weakness of the Pharisaic position. A social or ecclesiastical
tradition had taken the place of the will of God. This social
tradition was rigid and stern in respect of the 'tradition of the
elders,' but it did not revise itself constantly or at all in the light
of the mind of God, and therefore its moral standard became debased.
It 'made void the word of God because of the tradition.' It 'tithed
mint and anise and cummin, and left undone the weightier matters of the
law, judgement, and mercy, and faith.' It 'strained out the gnat, and
swallowed the camel[16].' It {12} came to be almost purely external
and consistent with even the grossest spiritual hypocrisy, as both St.
Paul and our Lord Himself assure us. Above all, it was completely
satisfied with itself. 'We have Abraham to our Father.' 'I thank thee
that I am not as other men are.' That is the characteristic tone of
Pharisees and of all who, however unlike them otherwise, are living by
a strong social standard and priding themselves on belonging to a
respectable and dignified class. This it is that St. Paul calls
seeking to be justified or commended to God by 'works' or 'works of the
law'--not, we must observe, 'good works,' such as are the fruit of a
right disposition towards God, of which St. Paul never spoke with any
disparagement.
It is the characteristic of the Pharisaic attitude that a man holds by
a strict code enforced by the public opinion of his church or circle; a
code which he diligently and even painfully obeys. But it is
characteristic of this attitude also that it resents new light, and
tacitly claims independence even of God, provided that 'the law' is
kept or the accepted standard maintained. Thus the Pharisees resented
the Christ, when renewing the voice of the old prophets, without
respect of persons, He exposed the {13} moral weaknesses of these
religious leaders, and bade them, in effect, begin again and think
afresh what God's will really meant: when He warned them that the one
unpardonable sin is to be self-satisfied in one's own eyes, and to
repudiate as an impertinent intruder the fresh divine light. The story
is very familiar. They resented and rejected the Christ because He
made the unlimited divine claim upon them: because He spoke to them as
God to the human soul, and not as the representative of 'the
tradition.' 'Seeking to establish their own righteousness, they did
not subject themselves to the righteousness of God[17].'
Now we understand what it is to seek to be justified by works. It is
to have a social or ecclesiastical code, and to claim acceptance in
God's sight because we perform it, meanwhile making 'the law' under
which we act, believed to be divine, a substitute for the living and
personal God, and resenting any fresh and immediate claim of God on the
human soul.
In this mixture of subservience and independence, of religious humility
and human pride, Saul of Tarsus had been brought up 'at the feet of
Gamaliel in Jerusalem.' His was not {14} one of those slack
consciences which enable men to take the lowest line which respectable
public opinion will allow. In every ecclesiastical system the strict
law comes to be mitigated by various dispensations and
compensations--generally substitutions of the easier ceremonial for the
harder moral requirement. But young Saul no doubt took the law in its
fullest sense as the thing to be kept, with all its accompanying
traditions. So taken, it constituted no doubt what St. Peter calls
it[18]--an intolerable yoke. A strict Jew must have had a very
difficult life of it. But it was not this yoke of specific outward
requirements that staggered St. Paul. What he found crushing was the
inward claim--'Thou shall not covet[19].' He who had determined to
appear before God at the last with a clear record as one who had kept
the law, found himself confronted by an inner and searching claim of
the divine righteousness, to which no blamelessness in outward conduct
enabled him to correspond. He could not help feeling himself a sinner
in the eye of God; and the sacrificial system plainly gave his
conscience no relief at all. He does not even allude to it in this
connexion. Meanwhile, as he moved {15} about in Jewish society of the
empire at Tarsus and elsewhere, he found that it required no spiritual
microscope to discover that the law in many of its plainest moral
injunctions was in fact not being observed at all. He seemed to see
that instead of the law being really the means of justification, it in
effect put 'the righteous nation' simply in the position of condemned
sinners, and himself among them, as fully as if they were simply
without a divinely given law, like the 'sinners of the Gentiles.'
We know well how, when the way of God had been learnt more perfectly,
this earlier moral experience of the effect of the law on himself and
others worked itself out in St. Paul's mind into a deep theory of the
function, not of 'the law' only, that is the Mosaic law, but of law
altogether--of 'the letter' of any body of external enactments. Law,
he found, could enlighten the conscience, but it could never reach deep
enough to the springs of will to strengthen and purify them. God must
become more intimate to man than any external law can make Him. A law
of ordinances can only be a preparatory discipline, intended by the
very falsity of the assumption on which it is based to teach men that
they are not what they fancied themselves. {16} They fancied
themselves beings sufficiently independent to stand on their own basis
and enter into a covenant with God, to make a compact with Him to
observe a law and to abide by the result. It is the function of such a
compact as between independent parties to convince men that any such
relation between God, the Creator and Giver, and man, the creature and
simply the receiver--still more between God the Holy and man the
defiled and weakened--is simply contrary to fundamental facts[20].
As yet, however, St. Paul was only rendered miserable by his experience
under the law. To feel himself a sinner alienated from God was a
profound humiliation to his spiritual pride. He was fired no doubt by
the lofty ideal of the righteous nation, standing before God in virtue
of its righteousness, of its performance of the divine law, and
therefore making its claim on God to vindicate it before the whole
world. He threw himself zealously into rigid observance: only,
however, to find himself humiliated and perplexed.
Meanwhile, he was becoming conscious of the {17} claim of Jesus of
Nazareth to be the Christ. Under what conditions that claim began to
confront him we do not in the least know. But he must have known in
the period before his conversion that the severest attack on the
spiritual position of the Pharisees ever delivered had been delivered
by Him who claimed to be the Christ; that the Pharisees in consequence
had thrown all their influence into the rejection of His claim, and if
they had not been the most direct instruments of His death, yet had
encouraged and sanctioned it. Thus the more dissatisfied he became in
his own conscience, the more zealous he grew for the Pharisaic
position, and the more fanatical, therefore, against the followers of
the crucified Jesus. At what point it began to dawn upon his
conscience that perhaps Jesus was right and not the Pharisees; that
perhaps it was in His teaching that his own restless heart was to find
repose, we can only wonder. Some struggle such as this dawning
consciousness would involve he certainly passed through. 'It was hard
for him to kick against the goad[21].' At last, and at a definite
moment, God 'triumphed over him' in Christ, and he gave in his {18}
allegiance to Jesus as the Christ on the road to Damascus. Many a man
has thus after a struggle surrendered to God at discretion: many a man
has shown the will, as Faber calls it,
'to lose my will in His,
And by that loss be free.'
But to no man can it ever have involved a completer sacrifice of his
own pride and prejudice--of his own personal comfort and safety--than
it did to St. Paul: and, therefore, in no man did it ever involve a
vaster increase of spiritual illumination. Hitherto he had stood on
the basis which his pride in his religious position gave him and,
starting thence, had sought to erect the spiritual fabric of a life
acceptable to God. But the more he had known of God and the more he
had struggled, the less satisfied he had become. God seemed to be in
no other attitude towards him than that of a dissatisfied taskmaster.
Now he had surrendered at discretion into God's hands. He had no
position of his own to maintain. He had put himself in God's hands.
In His sight he was content to be treated as a sinner, just like one of
the Gentiles--to be forgiven of His pure and unmerited love, and of His
pure and unmerited love endued with a spiritual power for which {19} he
could take no credit to himself, for it was simply a gift. Once more,
he had henceforth no prejudices and recognized no limitation on what he
might be required to bear or do. His life was handed over to be
controlled from above. Thus when St. Paul sets justification by faith
and faith only in opposition to justification by works of the law, he
is contrasting two different attitudes towards God and duty, which in
the two halves of his own sharply sundered life he had himself
conspicuously represented. The contrast may be expressed perhaps in
four ways.
1. The man under the law of works is mainly concerned about external
conduct and observances--the making clean of the outside of the cup and
the platter: the man of faith is concerned almost altogether with the
relation of his heart to God at the springs of action. Faith is a
disposition of the heart which indeed results in a certain kind of
outward conduct, but which has its value already, prior to the outward
conduct, because of what it inwardly is. Faith, as Calvin said,
pregnant with good works, justifies before they are brought forth.
This distinction between faith and works underlies St. Paul's teaching
in parts, but is never very prominent. {20} It accounts, however, for
St. Paul's shrinking from any insistence upon outward observances in
the Church, such as do not necessarily convey any spiritual meaning or
power. 'Why,' he cries to the Colossians, 'do ye subject yourselves to
ordinances; handle not, nor taste, nor touch (all which things are to
perish with the using), after the precepts and doctrines of men?[22]'
2. Inasmuch as 'the law' was a national thing, so 'works of the law'
were a supposed means of justification confined to Israel, and an
occasion of contempt for other nations. Faith, on the other hand, the
mere capacity to feel our own wants and to take God at His word, is a
universal quality and belongs, or may belong, to all men. Thus
justification by faith is opposed to justification by works of the law,
as the universal or catholic to the merely Jewish or national, and in
this aspect the contrast occupies a great place in St. Paul's thought
and teaching.
3. But it is not in the things it is occupied about, or in the range
of its activity, that faith is most centrally contrasted with works.
It is in the attitude of man towards God which it represents. The
'worker' for justification always {21} retains his own independence
towards God. He works upon the basis of a definite covenant by which
God is bound as well as himself. He has the right to resent additional
claims. Faith, on the other hand, means an entire abandonment of
independence. It is self-committal, self-surrender. 'I know him whom
I have believed, and I am persuaded that he is able to guard that which
I have committed unto him against that day[23].' The man of faith
throws all the responsibility for life on God, and says simply and
continually, 'Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth.'
It is of the utmost importance to notice that this is the only attitude
of man towards God which corresponds with the ultimate facts of human
nature, as science and philosophy are bound to represent them. Man is,
in fact, an absolutely dependent being, physically and spiritually.
His virtue must lie, not in originativeness, but in correspondence.
Supposing him a free agent in God's universe, his freedom can only
consist in a power to correspond with divine forces and laws
intelligently and voluntarily; or on the other hand to disturb the
divine order of creation in a measure by {22} wilfulness and sin. Now
faith is simply the faculty of loving correspondence with God.
'Justification by faith' is the only conception of justification which
is possible in the light of the root facts of human nature. But of
course the practical appeal of this conclusion to the heart and will is
immensely increased, if men can be shown to have acted as if they were
independent and to have found it a failure; if life lived in
independence of God, with God as it were withdrawn from the actual
scene of life to its far-off horizon, is found to have resulted in
havoc, weakness and despair. So, in fact, St. Paul's doctrine of the
true means of justification is based on an appeal, not so much to the
ultimate constitution of our human nature as to the experienced results
of our independence of God, to the facts of sin, whether among Gentiles
or Jews.
4. Finally, the principle of justification by faith is contrasted with
that of justification by works of the law in the view which it involves
of the character of God. The law, as St. Paul interprets it, views God
as a lord and taskmaster. Faith presents Him as the Father of our
spirits, always waiting upon us with His eternal, unchangeable love;
bearing with us; {23} dealing with us even on a false basis which by
our sins we have forced upon Him, in order to bring us to a recognition
of the true; anyway acting or withholding action, if by any means we
can be won to recognize His true character and our true life.
These are the broad contrasts between the alternative methods of
justification by faith or by 'works of the law.' The law, and the
attitude towards God which the law suggested, are, in St. Paul's view,
the main characteristic of the Old Testament. This is a point of view
which we should expect in one trained by the Pharisees. We may
possibly feel that St. Paul tends to identify with the Old Testament as
a whole one particular element in it which specially characterized one
particular period. But at least the element was there, and occupied
there a highly important place in the whole development; and if St.
Paul in his idealizing manner sometimes speaks as if it was the whole
of the older covenant, as if he had forgotten all the teaching of
prophet and psalmist, yet he is not really forgetful. Law is to him
the characteristic of the old covenant. But behind the law God's
dealings with Abraham are for ever in his imagination witnessing
against the law's {24} limitation, and a similar witness is kept up all
along: so that St. Paul can take out of one of the books of Moses his
very central statement of the principle of faith[24].
In what has just been said justifying faith has been treated as if it
were simply, as it is really, faith in God; whereas in St. Paul's
language the object of justifying faith is constantly 'Jesus[25].' The
explanation of this is that in Jesus Christ God has manifested His
character as Father, and has come near to men, 'reconciling the world
unto Himself,' by the atonement wrought through His incarnate Son, and
giving conspicuous evidence of His saving power by raising Him from the
dead[26]. Thus, if Jesus is the proximate object of justifying faith,
it is Jesus as manifesting the Father, Jesus as God incarnate; and St.
Peter is strictly interpreting St. Paul when he represents the object
of Christ's sacrifice and resurrection in the phrase, 'that your faith
and hope might be in God[27].' The faith of the Christian is the old
faith of Abraham and Habakkuk, the faith in the Lord {25} Jehovah only
now made manifest in a new and completer manner, in a more intimate
relation to human life, and with a more winning appeal to the human
heart.
iii.
Now that we have gained a general idea of what St. Paul meant by
justification by faith, as opposed to justification by works of law, we
are in a position to deal with a number of questions which have been
famous in ecclesiastical history. Does justification mean being made
righteous, or being reckoned for righteous? if it means the latter, how
can God reckon us as being what in fact we are not? Again, what is the
relation of this justification to sanctification? are these two stages,
of which the first is over before the second can begin? Again, what is
the relation of justification to Church membership? is justification a
purely individual process or fact, of which membership in the Church
or, what comes to the same thing, reception of the sacraments, is a
merely secondary and strictly unessential consequence?
The answers to these questions are all connected with one another.
Justification, to begin with, is a judicial or, as it is called,
'forensic' {26} word. It expresses the verdict of acquittal. The use
of the word in the Bible made this quite indisputable[28]. Thus God
justifies whenever He refuses to condemn--when, whatever may have been
our sins, He ignores them, and therefore positively admits us into the
accepted people. And He declares His willingness to do this simply
because a man believes in Jesus Christ. Let a man believe, or take God
in Jesus Christ at His gracious word, and the value of this act of
trust or allegiance is such that God reckons it for righteousness, and
admits a man into the accepted people, as if he were already fit for
such fellowship in his actual habits or character. There is
'imputation' here, but it is the right sort of imputation. It is
dealing with us not as we are, nor exactly as we are not, but as we are
becoming in virtue of a new attachment under which our life has passed:
and this, as the engrossing modern conception of development makes it
easy for us to perceive, is the only true and profound way of regarding
anything. Not the standard already reached, but the movement,
direction, or vitality is the important matter. Faith, then, is
'reckoned for righteousness' because it puts us upon the right {27}
basis and in the right relation to God; and therefore is a root out of
which, provided it continues to subsist, all righteousness can
healthily grow; whereas the most brilliant efforts or 'works' on a
wrong basis may have neither sound root nor principle of progress in
them. To believe in Jesus is to have the root of the matter in
oneself. Therefore, when a man first believes, God can ignore all his
previous life, and deal with him simply on the new basis, in hope. Of
course this preliminary acquittal or acceptance is provisional. As the
servant[29] who had been forgiven his debts found them rolled back upon
him when he behaved in a manner utterly inconsistent with the position
of a forgiven man, so our preliminary justification may be promptly
cancelled by our future conduct if we behave as one who has 'forgotten
the cleansing from his old sins[30].' The prodigal son, after he has
been welcomed home, may go back again to the 'far country.' But it
remains the fact:--of such infinite value and fruitfulness is faith in
God, as He has shown Himself in Jesus, that when a man first
believes--aye, whenever, over and over again, he returns to believe--he
is in God's sight on a new basis, however dark be the {28} background
of his previous sins; and he can be dealt with simply on the new basis,
according to the movement of the Father's heart of love which his faith
has set free.
Now the justifying faith of the conscience-stricken sinner, whose case
St. Paul always has in the foreground of his imagination, means first
of all and most obviously that he consciously takes God at His word as
being ready to forgive his sins, and accept him for Jesus' sake in whom
he believes. It is belief in God as forgiving, or in Jesus as--he does
not stop to inquire how--obtaining and giving him forgiveness. And St.
Paul laid great stress on this simple acceptance of the gift of pardon,
as the gate of the new life and the first act of faith, because the
readiness to be treated as a sinner and merely forgiven in spite 'f our
sins is, as he knew full well in his own case, the final overthrow of
spiritual pride. But this simple 'reliance on the merits of Christ,'
and acceptance of forgiveness at His hands and for His sake, is a
profound movement of the heart--of the spring of human actions--which
involves much more than appears. Luther was hopelessly wrong and
unlike St. Paul when he isolated this mere reliance on another's
merits, and, setting it apart from all {29} deeper movement of will or
love, would have it, and it only, concerned with our justification. To
St. Paul even the first movement of faith is a surrender of
independence, and a recognition in intellect, and much more in will, of
the lordship of Jesus. It is, in other words, a change of allegiance,
and this is the important thing about it. And the absolved man, in
thanking God for his forgiveness, finds himself, as it were, inevitably
and without any fresh act, embarked on a new service. If he does not
find this, he is not a man of faith at all. Faith is so deep a
principle that, though it shows itself first as the mere acceptance of
an undeserved boon from the divine bounty, it involves such hanging
upon God as necessarily enlists the will to choose and serve Him, the
intellect to know and worship Him with a growing perception as He is
revealed in Jesus, and the affections to desire and love Him. The life
of justification thus proceeds 'from faith to faith'--from faith in
Christ 'for us' to faith in Christ 'in us.' The justified man,
accepted into the 'body of Christ' by baptism and made a participator
of the life of Christ, receives the continual gifts of the divine
bounty in their appointed channels, and his faith exercising its
natural {30} faculty of correspondence, absorbs and appropriates the
divine gifts--intellectually, so that the eyes of the understanding are
opened in increasing knowledge--practically, so that 'Christ dwells in
the heart by faith,' and it is no longer the bare human self which
lives, but Christ which lives in the renewed man, with a continual
display of moral power.
The first justification or acceptance is therefore a preliminary step:
it is acceptance for admission into the divine household, or city of
God, or life in Christ. It is a means to an end, and that end the
fellowship of Christ, and continually developing assimilation to Him.
Does this mean, then, that justification and sanctification are
processes following the one on the other, of which the former is over
before the latter begins? Such a statement must be repudiated so far
as its latter clause is concerned. You cannot thus logically sever a
vital process. They are two parts of one vital process; and the man
who is not on the way to being made like Christ (however far off it he
may be at the moment) is by that very fact shown to be not in a state
of justification or acceptance with God. At any stage of spiritual
life there must be movement in order to make forgiveness {31} possible.
Grant this however and it becomes true that justification, as meaning
acquittal, is a preliminary to sanctification, that is, the being made
like Christ. The having our 'heart set at liberty' is a preliminary to
'running the way of God's commandments.' But even so we must recognize
that St. Paul never exactly uses this language. When he describes the
stages of God's dealings with the soul he passes from justification to
glorification, or (final) deliverance from sin and wrath[31]. Or, on
one occasion, he mentions sanctification before justification[32].
This is in part accounted for by the fact that the word translated
'sanctify' or 'sanctification' means rather 'consecrate' (as to
priesthood) or 'consecration.' And though this consecration involves
'sanctity' (in our sense) because of the character of God to whom we
are dedicated, yet it may precede it; and we are in fact consecrated
and hallowed at the moment when we are accepted into the 'priestly
body' and anointed with the divine unction[33]. This exact meaning of
the term sanctification in part accounts for St. Paul not speaking of
sanctification and justification as successive stages of the spiritual
life. When he {32} is speaking about justification he is answering the
question, What is the attitude of the human soul towards God which sets
God free, so to speak, to accept it and work upon it? And the answer
is, The attitude of faith. When he speaks of sanctification, or rather
consecration, he is answering the implied question, How is the
individual to be thought of when he has been admitted by baptism into
the Christian community? And the answer is, He is to be thought of as
consecrated, or as sharing the life of a consecrated people[34]. St.
Paul's language in one place would suggest that if 'justification'
qualifies for admission into the life in Christ, the result of this
admission is again a justification, not now merely of our persons, but
of our whole moral being--a 'justification of life[35].' But this is,
at least, not his usual use of the word.
And now we approach the question of the relation of our individual
justification to membership in the Church and all that goes with that.
To put the question in a rough controversial way--Is the Epistle to the
Romans, as it has been {33} frequently held to be, a thoroughly
Protestant work?
The Prophet Ezekiel first clearly discerned and expressed the truth
that the new covenant of God with man must be based upon the conversion
of individual wills and hearts. So it was realized. The basis of the
Church was a profound movement of individual faith and love and
allegiance, in the apostles and first disciples. And that on which it
is based is that by which it must progress--the real assent and
correspondence of individual wills and hearts. They that receive the
testimony must set to their seals that God is true. Thus one cannot
possibly exaggerate the importance in Christianity of the individual
spiritual life, or of individual conversion and faith, if he does not
isolate it. He cannot possibly exaggerate the stress laid in the
Epistle to the Romans on individual faith and its results, if he does
not forget its context. But what is meant by this proviso? This
simply. St. Paul, in his doctrine of justification by faith, is
describing the basis of the new covenant of God with man which is, as
truly as the old, a covenant with a community, an Israel of God. The
faith which justifies, therefore, means the faith which qualifies for
the community as truly {34} as it admits into the favour of God. The
very evidence that God accepts the first movement of faith is that the
believing man is admitted by baptism into the body of Christ. The idea
of a faith in Jesus which does not seek admission into 'the body,' or
disparages it even while it accepts it, does not even present itself to
St. Paul's mind. A faith which is content to remain outside Christ is
no faith at all, and the act of being 'baptized into Christ' is an act
by which 'in one spirit we are baptized into one body.' Again, the
conception impressed upon the institution of the Eucharist is that
Christ's atoning sacrifice is the basis of a new covenant with a
society which is to share His life[36].
Elsewhere St. Paul expresses this by saying that what Christ bought for
Himself was a Church, a new Israel[37]. What His sacrifice purchased
was a new _community_. There is the less necessity to insist upon this
truth because it is now being very generally perceived. The most
powerful influence in recent German Protestant theology is that of
Albrecht Ritschl, and through him the truth has come back, through
unexpected channels, that the object {35} of the sacrificial death of
Christ, and therefore of the divine justification, is not the
individual but the Church[38]; or, if we may venture to modify the
phrase, the object of divine justification is the individual only as
becoming and remaining (so far as His will is concerned) a member of
the Church. In fact, 'justification' may be rendered, without any
false idea being attached to it, 'acceptance for membership in the
sacred people, the Israel of God.' And where any one has become a
member of the Church without even the rudimentary faith which can
render him acceptable in God's sight, there the awakening of such faith
is the condition of profitable or 'saving' membership.
From this point of view it is not difficult to see the relation of our
epistle, broadly, to Protestantism and Catholicism. Protestantism was
a reaction against one-sided ecclesiasticism. The Church is the
household of God, the home of His people. She guides and disciplines
their souls. She feeds them with the bread of life. But her
representatives may suffer her to lose the spiritual characteristics of
the new covenant {36} and fall back upon those of the old. She may
come to be characterized by a mere authoritativeness. The spirit of
'the law of ordinances' may come to prevail again. The sacraments may
be treated as charms; or, in other words, all moral and spiritual
requirement may be summed up in mere obedience, or in doing this and
that. So, in fact, it happened to a great extent in the popular
mediaeval system; and Protestantism was a reaction. It was a reaction
based on truth, as Luther seemed to himself to re-discover it in the
epistles to the Romans and the Galatians. But the reaction broke up
the communion of Christians. It thus impaired the sense of the one
body, and very often resulted in obliterating the perception of any
obligation to the visible body of Christ at all. It became
individualist, and disparaged the sacraments which are at once both the
outward means of union with Christ and the bonds of cohesion for His
body, the Church. But as we now look back upon the matter, we can see
as clearly as it is possible to see anything, that both mediaeval
Catholicism and Lutheran Protestantism (or modern English
Protestantism) represent one-sided developments in which thoughtful men
cannot permanently acquiesce. The preliminary justifying {37} faith of
the individual does but warrant his admission into the body of Christ,
the divine society, by baptism. And once admitted into the body, and
instructed in her tradition, faith finds its function intellectually in
meditating upon and appropriating the full meaning of the mystery of
God, and spiritually in appropriating and digesting the powers of that
divine and human life into which baptism admits us, and in which the
sacramental feast and sacrifice continually makes us anew
participators. The Church with its sacramental gifts, and the personal
faith of the converted heart, are no more to be set in antithesis than
food and digestion, or the 'virtue which went out of Christ' and the
faith in Him which made men whole. The sacraments certainly do not
save us without conversion and faith, and faith which leaves us
voluntarily isolated from the visible communion of the one body is not
what St. Paul meant by 'justifying faith.'
'Ah, yet consider it again!' is what we are continually tempted to
exclaim to some of our modern controversialists who appear to be still
repeating the watchwords of the sixteenth century. For in fact the
famous controversial positions of the period of the Reformation were
{38} intensely one-sided, and have been antiquated by completer and
maturer study--not least in the matter of justification.
Thus Calvin's position on the subject was based upon and permeated by a
conception of God as predestinating and creating and internally
constraining some men to eternal life, and equally predestinating and
creating and abandoning other men, without possibility of recovery, to
eternal misery. Such a conception is utterly abhorrent to modern
consciences: and we shall have occasion to observe with how little
reason any conception of God predestinating man to eternal misery has
been attributed to St. Paul[39].