brought in upon his mind the tremendous undertaking that lay before him
and before the Christian Church as they found themselves confronted
with this vast imperial organization, which might at any time lay its
iron hand upon them to stop their progress. Therefore he adds that,
even in view of Rome, he has courage in his heart: 'for I am not
ashamed of the gospel,' even under the shadow {58} of the mighty name,
and though it was 'to the Jews a stumbling-block and to the Greeks
foolishness.' And why? Because he knows what the gospel means. It is
not mere words; it is a power. It is a 'power of God,' a divine force,
which, like the wind, bloweth where it listeth, and which nothing can
stop. It is a power of God. It is a power of God 'unto salvation,' a
power that is to work men's deliverance, and that in the deepest sense.
Roman emperors not very long after St. Paul's time are commemorated in
public inscriptions as 'saviours of the world[3].' That is in the
sense of maintaining peace and civil order. But Christ's salvation was
of a deeper sort. It was salvation from the bondage of sin, a
salvation which enabled people to be truly and eternally free. It is a
power of God unto salvation, and that 'to every one that believeth,' on
the mere basis of the simple willingness to take God at His word; 'to
the Jew first and also to the Greek.' 'For'--and here St. Paul reaches
the great text of his whole epistle--'therein' (that is, in the gospel)
'is disclosed,' or revealed here and now in the world, {59} 'a
righteousness of God.' By this phrase it will appear that he means
both a righteousness which is God's own, and also a righteousness which
God gives to men; for the gift of God is real moral and spiritual
fellowship with His own life. This is what is now offered to men. A
righteousness of God is revealed, starting from faith and at every
stage moving on upon the support of faith, 'a righteousness of God by
faith unto faith'; and that not in repudiation of the old covenant, but
in fulfilment of its vital principle: 'as it is written.' For the
words of Habakkuk may be interpreted to express the central spirit of
the Old Testament--'the righteous shall live by faith[4].'
First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for you all that your faith
is proclaimed throughout the whole world. For God is my witness, whom
I serve in my spirit in the gospel of his Son, how unceasingly I make
mention of you, always in my prayers making request, if by any means
now at length I may be prospered by the will of God to come unto you.
For I long to see you, that I may impart unto you some spiritual gift,
to the end ye may be established; that is, that I with you may be
comforted in you, each of us by the other's faith, both yours and mine.
And I would not have you ignorant, brethren, that oftentimes I purposed
to come unto you (and was hindered hitherto), that I might have some
fruit in you also, even {60} as in the rest of the Gentiles. I am
debtor both to Greeks and to Barbarians, both to the wise and to the
foolish. So, as much as in me is, I am ready to preach the gospel to
you also that are in Rome. For I am not ashamed of the gospel: for it
is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the
Jew first, and also to the Greek. For therein is revealed a
righteousness of God by faith unto faith: as it is written, But the
righteous shall live by faith.
1. Origen's comment on the words 'through Jesus Christ' (at the
beginning of this section) is very interesting. 'To give God thanks is
to offer a sacrifice of praise, and therefore he adds "through Jesus
Christ," as through the great high priest.' Indeed, the doctrine of
the high priesthood of Christ, if it is not mentioned in St. Paul's own
epistles, is implied there from the first.
2. St. Paul, we notice, expresses his intention to come to Rome with
reserve, 'if by any means by the will of God' ... 'so much as lies in
me.' And this reserve was no matter of mere words. He was going up to
Jerusalem with an offering of money, about which he felt the greatest
anxiety, and he knew not how he would be received, or what would befall
him[5].
3. It is not possible to decide what sort of {61} 'spiritual gift' St.
Paul is thinking of. We know that as an apostle he was qualified to
impart the Holy Ghost by the laying on of hands, and that certain
'gifts' frequently accompanied His inward presence. Thus, 'when Paul
had laid his hands upon some men at Ephesus, the Holy Ghost came on
them; and they spake with tongues and prophesied.' We know, further,
that the Corinthian Church, whence St. Paul was writing this letter,
was specially rich in 'spiritual gifts,' such as 'tongues and
prophecy.' On the other hand, the Roman Christians had not yet
received an apostolic visit and they may have been lacking in such
endowments, while the reception of them would be calculated to
encourage them and strengthen their faith.
It is possible, therefore, that he refers to a gift of this kind, and
the exact language he uses certainly suggests some definite endowment,
for the bestowal of which his bodily presence was necessary. The
thought of the miraculous power working through him, 'the power of
signs and wonders, the power of the Holy Ghost[6],' was not far from
his mind when he wrote this epistle.
Origen's comment on this passage also is {62} interesting. 'First of
all we ought to learn that it is an apostolic work to long to see our
brethren, but for no other reason than that we may confer on them
something in the way of a spiritual gift if we can, and if we cannot,
that we may receive in the same kind from them. Otherwise, the longing
to go about among the brethren is not to be approved.'
We cannot doubt, I think, that when St. Paul's letter was read at Rome
this introduction, so full of tact, would have given him access to many
hearts inclined at starting to be prejudiced against him.
[1] Rom. xv. 29.
[2] 'To encourage' and 'encouragement' are probably the best words to
translate what in our Bible is rendered by 'comfort.'
[3] Hadrian and Trajan: see _C.I.G._ vol. ii. p. 1068, No. 2349 m.;
vol. iii. p. 170, No. 4339, p. 191, No. 4380. These references I owe
to Mr. H. W. B. Joseph, of New College.
[4] Hab. ii. 4; cf. app. note A on meanings of the word 'faith.'
[5] Rom. xv. 25 ff.; Acts xx. 22.
[6] Rom. xv. 19.
{63}
DIVISION I. (CHAPTERS I. 18-III. 20.)
_The universality of sin and condemnation._
St. Paul has enunciated his great thesis. There has arrived into the
world a new and divine force making for man's fullest salvation: the
disclosure of a real fellowship in the moral being of God, which is
open to all men, Jew and Gentile equally, on the simple terms of taking
God at His word. This word of good tidings St. Paul is to expand and
justify in his epistle; but first he must pause and explain its
antecedents. Why was such a disclosure needed at this moment of the
world's history? Why has St. Paul spoken of 'salvation,' or why does
he elsewhere speak of 'redemption,' instead of expressing such ideas as
are most popular among ourselves to-day--development or progress? It
is because, to St. Paul's mind, man as he is is held in a bondage which
he ought to find intolerable, and the first step to freedom lies in the
recognition of this. Again, why does St. Paul {64} lay such emphasis
on faith, mere faith, only faith--why is he to insist so zealously on
the exclusion of any merit or independent power on man's part? It is
not only because faith, the faculty of mere reception and
correspondence, represents the normal and rational relation of man to
God, his Creator, Sustainer, Father. It is also, and with special
emphasis, because there has been a great revolt, a great assertion of
false independence on man's part; and what is needed first of all is
the submission of the rebel, or much rather the return of the prodigal
son, simply to throw himself on the mercy of his Father and acknowledge
his utter dependence upon Him for the forgiveness of his disloyalty and
his outrages, as well as for the fellowship which he seeks in the
divine life. The fuller statement therefore of St. Paul's gospel must
be postponed to the uncloaking of what man is without it. The note of
severity must be struck before the message of joy. We must be brought
to acknowledge ourselves to be not men only, but corrupt men--men under
the divine wrath--doomed men powerless to deliver ourselves, and ready
therefore to welcome in simple gratitude the large offer of God's
liberal and almost unconditional love.
{65}
It is to produce this acknowledgement that St. Paul now addresses
himself. This argument of the first part of the epistle is a very
simple one. It elucidates two plain propositions:--
1. that the wrath of God is, and is necessarily according to eternal
and unalterable principles of moral government, and in the case of
every man without any possibility of exception, upon sin.
2. that all men, Jews and Gentiles, are held in sin, and therefore lie
under the divine wrath.
Thus St. Paul immediately follows up his initial statement of the
revelation of a divine righteousness with the assertion of another
'revelation' made plain to the consciences of men. 'The wrath of God
is being revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and
unrighteousness of men,' and he proceeds to demonstrate the prevalence
of sin first of all in the heathen world and to lay bare its meaning.
{66}
DIVISION I. Sec. I. (CHAPTER I. 18-32).
_Judgement on the Gentile world._
Before we read this passage certain points should be plain to our minds.
1. By sin St. Paul means essentially wilfulness--wilful disobedience.
There is such a thing as an inheritance of moral weakness or perversity
which passes to men without their fault and without their knowledge.
This, the real existence of which hardly any one can deny, is what is
called original sin; and later on we shall find St. Paul speaking of
it. But it is not what is most properly called sin. God is absolutely
equitable. 'Sin is not reckoned' as sin in His sight, apart from
knowledge and will. Sin, most properly speaking, begins and ends where
wilful disobedience begins and ends. St. Paul on this matter is
completely at one with St. John {67} when he makes sin and lawlessness
identical as realities in the world. 'Sin is lawlessness[1].' And we
cannot even make a beginning of advance along St. Paul's line of
thought till we recognize the real existence of sin as something
different in kind from ignorance or weakness or lack of development,
and as an incomparably greater evil than those. Sin is the created
will setting itself against the divine will. It is, as a state or an
act, the refusal of God. And the recognition of the awful existence of
this refusal of God is the main clue to understanding the miseries of
the present world.
2. Sin therefore, involving as it does _wilful_ disobedience, can only
be spoken of as prevalent over the heathen world because, not merely
one chosen race, but all men in general have had the opportunity of the
knowledge of God. St. Paul indeed elsewhere modifies the general
assertion of the fact which he makes in this place, by broadly
recognizing that there are states of human existence which are low in
their moral standard, but are rendered comparatively guiltless by the
absence of moral knowledge--states of life where sin exists but is not
reckoned {68} as sin[2]. For 'sin,' he says, 'is not reckoned' as sin
where there is no enlightening law and no consequent condemnation of
conscience. But in this passage, looking at humanity in general, he
asserts, like the author of the Book of Wisdom or the perhaps
contemporary Jewish author of the Apocalypse of Baruch[3], that all men
have had the opportunity of knowing God from His works in nature, and
that their present state is the result of a wilful refusal of Him.
They are 'without excuse.' The sources of the natural knowledge of God
are indeed twofold, for there is the moral conscience, individual and
social, of which St. Paul speaks later; but here it is the evidence of
nature alone of which St. Paul speaks: the witness of the creatures to
'the {69} invisible things' or attributes of their creator, that is to
say, to His power and (generally) His divinity.
3. Assuming then the opportunity of the knowledge of God as lying
behind human records, St. Paul traces the history of sin. It had its
roots in the refusal of the human will to recognize God and give Him
the homage of gratitude and service due to Him. Men 'held down the
truth in unrighteousness,' that is, restrained it from having free
course in their hearts and in the world because of the painful moral
obligations which it involves. Knowing God, they refused to
acknowledge Him with thankfulness or 'give Him the glory.' Rather they
would themselves 'be as gods.' They 'refused to have God in their
knowledge.' Then from this root in the rebel will sin passed to the
obscuring of the understanding, as is shown in the ridiculous
aberrations of idolatry. 'They became vain in their reasonings, and
their senseless heart was darkened; professing themselves to be wise,'
the nations in their worship showed themselves fools. Idolatry had
long ago appeared simply ridiculous to Isaiah: he pointed the finger of
scorn at the idolaters. 'They know not,' he cried, 'neither do they
{70} consider: the Lord hath shut their eyes that they cannot see, and
their hearts that they cannot understand. And none calleth to mind,
neither is there knowledge nor understanding to say, I have burned part
of the wood in the fire; yea, also I have baked bread upon the coals
thereof; I have roasted flesh and eaten it: and shall I make the
residue thereof an abomination? shall I fall down to the stock of a
tree? He feedeth on ashes: a deceived heart hath turned him aside,
that he cannot deliver his soul, nor say, Is there not a lie in my
right hand[4]?' Isaiah's language and thought had been elaborated and
developed in the Book of Wisdom[5], and St. Paul appropriates it. To
mistake creatures for the Creator, or to think of the glorious and
spiritual God as if He were in the form of the corruptible body of man
or beast or bird or reptile--so St. Paul alludes to the man worship of
Greece and the animal worship of Egypt--is simple blindness and folly;
blindness and folly in which St. Paul sees the just punishment of {71}
the rebellious will in the region of the intellect. But it has another
punishment in the region of the appetites or passions. As men
deliberately 'repudiated' the knowledge and obedience of God, God
'repudiated' men in penal retribution. He gave them up to become vile
in their own eyes and to find out their impotence to control their own
lusts. They ran riot even in all sorts of unnatural and lawless ways,
so that the world became full of sins of all kinds; sins against God
and sins against man; antisocial sins of all sorts, the sins which
destroy the state and friendship and commerce and the home: and at the
last the very ideal of righteousness had come to be lost. St. Paul, we
notice, makes the lowest moral stage of all to consist, not in merely
doing these wicked things, but in abandoning all distaste for
them--consenting unrestrainedly to those who do them; and this
profoundly true remark explains the moral impotence of much that is
from other points of view excellent in Greek literature.
4. For the punishment of all this sin St. Paul is not content to look
to the 'day of judgement,' though that is to be the final and
characteristic expression of divine wrath, and that 'day of wrath' he
still probably anticipated in the more {72} immediate future; but he
sees already in the actual world of human society as he knows it the
manifold evidence of the divine wrath here and now. Men are receiving
in themselves the fitting reward of their perversity. Their life has
found its own punishment. The divine wrath is actually disclosed in
the facts of experience. 'Look,' St. Paul seems to say, 'at the way
men are living, and ask yourselves if there is any interpretation but
one of the facts you see. There is but one conclusion possible. God
has condemned and is showing His wrath on the human nature which He
made.' Just in the same way in an earlier epistle St. Paul speaks of
the Jews, even before the destruction of Jerusalem, as already judged,
already the subject of the divine wrath[6]. And God's method of
judgement is this. The punishment lies in the natural consequences of
the lawless actions. The wages of sin is also its fruit[7]. And
further, this punishment of sin involves the increased liability to sin
again. One sin 'gives us over' to another, as one good action
facilitates another. This idea was familiar to Jewish teachers. Among
the 'sayings of the Fathers' we find, 'Every fulfilment of duty is
rewarded by another, {73} and every transgression is punished by
another[8].' St. Paul, in fact, in this chapter, may be said to be
concentrating for the Christian Church all that is best and deepest in
the moral philosophy of Judaism.
Now we are in a position to read the first section of St. Paul's
argument without perhaps finding any single idea to the interpretation
of which we have not a clue.
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness
and unrighteousness of men, who hold down the truth in unrighteousness;
because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God
manifested it unto them. For the invisible things of him since the
creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the
things that are made, _even_ his everlasting power and divinity; that
they may be without excuse: because that, knowing God, they glorified
him not as God, neither gave thanks; but became vain in their
reasonings, and their senseless heart was darkened. Professing
themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the
incorruptible God for the likeness of an image of corruptible man, and
of birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.
Wherefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts unto
uncleanness, that their bodies should be dishonoured among themselves:
for that they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and
served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever.
Amen.
{74}
For this cause God gave them up unto vile passions: for their women
changed the natural use into that which is against nature: and likewise
also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their
lust one toward another, men with men working unseemliness, and
receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was due.
And even as they refused to have God in _their_ knowledge, God gave
them up unto a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not
fitting; being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness,
covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit,
malignity; whisperers, backbiters, hateful to God, insolent, haughty,
boastful, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without
understanding, covenant-breakers, without natural affection,
unmerciful: who, knowing the ordinance of God, that they which practise
such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but also consent
with them that practise them.
1. Perhaps the first question which arises in our minds when reading
this passage is, whether St. Paul's general account of the heathen
world is not unjustifiably severe. Does he not paint it too black? In
fact, the account he gives coincides with the account given by other
Jews of the Gentile world as in their experience they found it; and
this, we must remember, means the Gentile world of the great cities of
the empire. They thought, as they moved about the world and saw what
they could not but {75} see, that God had forsaken the Gentiles because
they refused to acknowledge His law. There was sin enough in Israel,
but it was remediable. The sin of the Gentiles was irremediable. God
had forsaken them[9]. This last idea is of course one entirely alien
to St. Paul's mind. To him all God's judgements, at least in this
world, have one intention--to awaken men to recognize the truth and to
stir them to conversion, 'that he may have mercy upon all.' But
otherwise St. Paul's view of the Gentile world, as he experienced it in
the cities of mixed Greek and Asiatic population of the Roman Empire,
and especially in the notoriously wicked Corinth where he was
writing[10], was the ordinary Jewish view. And a contemporary Stoic
philosopher, who wrote at Ephesus under the name of Heracleitus, gives
a picture of society in that city fully as black[11].
At the same time, if we are to be fair, we must recognize that the
account, while true, is not complete. The Gentile life was not without
its 'salt.' There was a great deal of virtue, both domestic and
philosophical, in the {76} empire--more perhaps in the country, of
which St. Paul knew little, than in the towns. And the existence of
this salt he acknowledges when, in the second chapter of this epistle,
he speaks of Gentiles which have no revealed law but do by nature the
things of law, being a law unto themselves, and having the effect of
the law written in their hearts, and a witnessing conscience,
individual and social, to help them[12]: and again, when he intimates
that there is an uncircumcision which puts the circumcision to shame by
keeping the law[13]. But it is not St. Paul's way to exactly correlate
the different aspects of his subject as a modern writer would do. He
is a prophet and preacher, not a formally systematic writer. It is
enough for him that the sin which he is describing is a reality: that
its tendencies are what he describes them to be: that, whatever other
counter tendency there may be, sin is so dominant in the world that its
results are as he represents them, and that the conscience and
experience of those to whom he writes will respond to his indictment.
Nor, if we give its metaphorical meaning to 'idolatry,' is there a word
which St. Paul says in this chapter which would not be true of our {77}
modern civilization in London or Paris or New York. With us indeed
Christianity has been sufficiently vigorous to provide a counteracting
force, of infinitely stronger power than existed in the Roman world, to
resist corruption. The agencies of divine strength and recovery, the
centres of health and light, are infinitely more numerous, stronger,
more constant, more progressive. But the world of sin is still what it
was: and always there lies upon it the same stamp of the divine
condemnation. We look around on the life of our city, with its selfish
and disgusting lusts, with its drunkenness, with its enervating luxury,
with its selfish wealth, with its reckless and immoral gambling, with
its dishonest commerce, with its grasping avarice so neglectful of the
lives of those whom it makes its instruments: we look round, I say, not
on the whole life, but on the sinful life of our city, and we see what
human nature is plainly meant not to be, either in its characteristics
or in its miserable issues. And by the interval between what we see
life to be and what we know it was meant to be, we can measure the
reality of the divine judgement. The facts press upon us the truth
which St. Paul would teach. The sinful life is a condemned life. Here
is an {78} actual disclosure of the wrath of God upon all
unrighteousness and sin.
2. But what will 'science' say to St. Paul's account of human
degeneracy and degradation? Does not St. Paul seem to talk, as
moralists in general have been disposed to talk, as if the course of
the world's history had been a downward course? and is not this the
religious view? and is it not directly opposed to the scientific view
of a gradual process of development and advance? This is a very common
form of question to suggest itself to our minds. And the answer to it
appears to be this[14]:--The biblical view of the world is not by any
means that as a whole it has gone from bad to worse. It recognizes
periods and areas of degradation, and suggests periods and areas of
stagnation. And this is what anthropology and history equally suggest.
But its main concern is with the history of one particular line of
human advancement under divine guidance through Abraham and Moses and
prophets and kings, through Christ and His Church: an advancement which
is to be finally world-wide, and even more than world-wide, in its
effects. Other lines of progress in civilization and knowledge {79}
the Bible recognizes but is not largely concerned with. But it is in
its general effect thoroughly in accord with science, which suggests
not general and equable advance over the whole region of humanity, but
advance in special departments along the line of select races,
continually impeded in its progress by counter tendencies, by periods
and areas of degradation, and still more of stagnation[15]. Science,
indeed, utters no word of promise at all as to the ultimate result of
all this evolution[16]. It is faith, of whatsoever sort, not science,
that can make us optimistic as to the issue of human history.