warning to us nineteenth-century Christians against censoriousness.
'Judging' occupies so large a part in our ordinary conversation. In
the religious world, we condemn so freely--Romanists, Dissenters, those
who are of a different party to ourselves: in the social world--those
of a different class, those who employ us, or whom we employ, {99}
those whom in any way we do not like or who go contrary to us. We are
always judging. But to judge, we are taught, is a great
responsibility. With what judgement we judge, we shall be judged. It
is of the utmost consequence that before we judge others we should have
judged ourselves. And to have done that truthfully has a tendency to
make us charitable in our estimate of others, because we are deeply
conscious of our own need of merciful and lenient consideration.
2. What St. Paul teaches about the moral consciousness, and
possibility of moral goodness, among the Gentiles has not a Jewish
sound at all. The Jewish teachers generally would not have admitted
any goodness acceptable to God in the heathen world. In fact, St. Paul
is here, as in his speech at Athens, accepting the principle of a
universal presence and operation of God in the human heart, outside the
limit of any special revelation, and he accepts it in terms largely
derived from current Stoic philosophy.
The Stoics, arising when the Greek city life was decaying, contemplated
man as an individual, and undertook to show him how to lead a good
life. A good life means a 'life according {100} to nature,' or
'according to reason': the reason of the individual being a part of the
universal reason or God. And as a help in living according to reason,
the Stoics laid stress upon the conscience in each man, i.e. a faculty
lying behind his ordinary surface self, passing judgement according to
reason upon his actions, and 'making cowards of us all,' inasmuch as we
all do wrong.
'No one,' said Seneca, St. Paul's contemporary, 'will be found who can
acquit himself; and any man calling himself innocent has regard to the
human witness, not to his own conscience.' He quotes an 'admirable
saying of Epicurus,' 'The beginning of safety is the knowledge of sin.'
He inculcates the duty of strict self-examination, and tells us how he
performed it himself at night: 'when the light is removed, and my wife,
who is by this time aware of my practice, is now silent, I pass the
whole of my day under examination.' Then he 'opens out his conscience
to the gods.' And this conscience is to every man a sort of inward
God[6]. It is in fact the representative in each man of the universal,
immutable, and divine moral law, the {101} law of nature, in conformity
with which is the only true freedom and citizenship of the world. 'For
this' (the world of the moral order), said another contemporary of St.
Paul, also a philosopher, 'is the common home of all, and its law is no
written document (letter), but God. And if a man transgresses what the
law imposes, he will be impious; or rather he will not dare transgress,
for he could not escape. Justice has many furies, watch-dogs for
sins[7].' There is in Cicero's _Republic_ a magnificent expression of
the principle of the law of nature: 'There is a true law which is right
reason, agreeable to nature, diffused among all men, constant, eternal,
which calls us to duty by its injunctions, and by its prohibitions
deters us from wrong; which upon the good lays neither injunction nor
prohibition in vain; while for the bad, neither its injunctions nor its
prohibitions avail at all. This law admits neither of addition nor
subtraction nor abrogation. The vote of neither senate nor people can
discharge us from our obligation to it. We are not to look for some
other person to expound or interpret it; nor will there be one law for
Rome and another for Athens, nor {102} one at this date and another
later on; but one law shall embrace all races over all time, eternal
and immortal; and there shall be hereby one common master and commander
of all--God, who originated this law and proposed it and arbitrates
concerning it; and if any one obeys it not, he shall play false to
himself and shall do despite to the nature of man, and by this very
fact shall pay the greatest penalties, even if he should escape all
else that is reckoned punishment.' It is of interest to notice that
the words cited by St. Paul before the Areopagus[8], 'We are also God's
offspring,' occur in a hymn of the Stoic Cleanthes, full of the thought
of man's relation through his reason to the universal and divine law.
Of this type of thought and language then St. Paul avails himself, in
spite of the immense differences which disclose themselves below the
surface between the Stoic and the Christian ideas of God. He avails
himself of Stoic phraseology about men being God's offspring in his
speech at Athens, as being in accordance with what he, the Christian
apostle, had to teach. And here he adopts in substance the Stoic
language with regard to conscience. As by inference from {103} nature
all men can know of God's power and divine attributes, so, St. Paul
says, from the witness of conscience they may know the principles of
His moral government[9]. St. Paul, however, rightly refuses to be
satisfied with the individual conscience. The social judgement--the
social verdicts of condemnation or acquittal continually being
passed--co-operate with it to anticipate the judgements of God. And in
virtue of the inward light of reason, and the conscience[10] both
individual and social, he held that men who lie outside the region of
special revelation can possess the moral law in effect in their hearts,
and, it is implied, can keep it.
St. Paul is mainly occupied in this epistle in contrasting the
Christian Church, as a region where spiritual power is given in
response to faith to enable a man to fulfil the divine law, both with
the heathen world, plunged in moral wickedness, and with the Jewish
Church in its failure to attain to divine righteousness by the law of
works--of which more hereafter. {104} But there were among the Jews
true sons of Abraham: and there were among the Gentiles good men
acceptable to God, like righteous Job. St. Paul does not theorize
about this. But there is at least no reason to deny that he would have
declared these righteous men to be justified by faith and sanctified by
grace, i.e. justified by that degree of truthful correspondence with
God which was possible for them; and kept in harmony with the will of
God by His Spirit. There is no reason to believe that St. Paul would
not have admitted some action of faith and grace among the
non-christian Gentiles, as he undoubtedly does among the prae-christian
Jews who lived under or before the law. When he says of the good
heathen that they do '_by nature_ the things contained in the law,' he
uses the expression not as equivalent to 'by their own unassisted
powers, without the help of God,' but simply to mean 'without the help
of any special revelation[11].'
{105}
Universally then, according to St. Paul, two sources of the knowledge
of God exist; nature, with its evidences of the divine power and other
similar attributes, and conscience, with its witness to divine
righteousness. And, though the sciences of nature and man have grown
since St. Paul's day past recognition, nothing (we may boldly say) has
really weakened either element of this double witness. It is, and
remains true, that the only reasonable argument from the universal
order of nature is to a universal reason or mind: and that the method
by which the moral conscience may be believed to have developed out of
'animal intelligence,' makes no difference as to the cogency of its
witness to a divine righteousness, in response to which alone it could
have developed as in fact it has done. It is worth notice also before
we leave this part of our subject, that St. Paul's line of thought
affords a true explanation of the double fact that, on the one hand,
the actual moral standards with which the conscience of different
individuals, races, and generations is satisfied, greatly varies; and,
on the other hand, that all the standards tend towards unity in a
common idea of righteousness. The tendency towards unity St. Paul
would attribute to the divine righteousness {106} which lies behind
conscience and which it exists to reflect. The variations would be due
to the different degrees of development reached; or still more to the
different degrees of faithfulness or unfaithfulness, attention or
inattention, with which the conscience of the race or the individual
has responded to the light. The conscience, like the speculative
reason, is an instrument for coming to the truth; but an instrument
capable of every variety of racial or individual error or obtuseness.
3. It appears clearly enough in this chapter, that St. Paul's
doctrines of free grace and justification by faith must be grossly and
carelessly misconceived unless they are viewed upon a deep background
of what we commonly call 'natural religion,' that is (practically) the
religion that appeals straight off to the conscience of almost all
honest and civilized men. It is 'natural religion' to believe that God
will judge men with absolute power and insight and impartiality
according to their conduct and their characters: that there can be no
'making believe,' no substitute for a good character, and no escaping
with a bad one. The prophets are full of this principle. Our Lord
reasserts it. It is emphasized by St. James, whose plain {107} point
is that we are justified not by right belief (which is what he means by
'faith'), but by a good life. But no one could assert the principle
more simply and absolutely as the basis of all his special evangelical
teaching than St. Paul. And whatever is true about free grace and
justification by faith only, is true because, and only because, this
free grace and this justifying faith are necessary means or steps
towards the realization of actual righteousness. So St. Paul states
it--'that the requirement of the (divine) law might be fulfilled in us
who walk[12]' according to the principles of the 'gospel of the grace
of God.' The doctrine of grace is rooted and based upon the truths of
natural religion, and leads up to their realization. It has been then
a most perilous mistake when missionaries have preached the doctrines
of grace and redemption in regions where there had been no preparatory
training in natural religion--in the truth of the unity and power and
moral character of God: of the reality of our responsibility towards
Him: of His inexorable holiness: of His inaccessibility to any kind of
bribe or attempt to find some substitute for moral obedience. Men must
have known what {108} it is to tremble in the recesses of their being
'as guilty men surprised' before God's awful righteousness; to
'tremble,' like Felix, at the message of 'righteousness, temperance,
and judgement to come,' before they can safely learn the lesson of His
grace and pardon.
And there are two minor elements in natural religion, as commonly
understood, for which St. Paul here makes himself responsible. It has
been generally understood that all men instinctively desire their own
happiness, and that this is natural and right; and that as we should
reasonably prefer our more permanent and deeper good to what is only
transitory and superficial, so we should strive for the happiness and
satisfaction which is eternal--the eternal reward, which only the stern
pursuit of virtue can obtain for us. This deep desire for our own
substantial happiness our Lord sanctions and continually suggests as a
principal motive for right living. The love of others does not
annihilate it. 'Thou shalt love thy neighbour _as thyself_.' So then
St. Paul also, following his Master, recognizes it as lying at the
heart of what is right and true in mankind, that we should 'seek' for
ourselves 'glory, honour, and incorruption'--the glory and honour which
abide {109} eternally. It is plain that he would have us pay no heed
to that truly unnatural modern altruism which would disparage and
depreciate this motive of a right self-love, and which would treat the
desire for eternal happiness, and fear of eternal loss, as a base and
unworthy element in religion. No doubt it is not the only motive. It
is not even the characteristically Christian motive. But it is a
natural and legitimate motive all the same. It is an inextinguishable
consciousness in us that we were meant for blessedness.
But, once more, the only true happiness is moral happiness: it is a
'glory and honour' springing out of the man's character and belonging
to it: it is a happiness that is in this sense deserved. True, the
servant of God in heaven will always feel that what he is receiving is
infinitely beyond his deserts, and that his deserts are what God has
wrought in him, not he himself. None the less the reward springs out
of and belongs to what God has actually made him to be. Heaven is not
a happy place in such a sense that we could be made happy by being 'put
there' by an arbitrary fiat of God. It is fellowship with God, the
All-holy; and God's holiness is intolerable, it is 'devouring fire and
{110} everlasting burnings,' to those who are not morally like Him.
Here lies the reason why a heaven is not possible to moral beings
without the accompanying possibilities of a hell. For the moral
possibility of acquiring the holy character involves the opposite moral
possibility: and it does not lie in the moral nature of things that the
bad character should receive anything except what it deserves--the
'indignation and wrath' which God, because He is God, must express
towards the sinful, wilful character, and which to the character itself
means 'tribulation and anguish.' This, St. Paul says positively, must
be the lot of 'every soul of man that doeth evil.' It is this
inevitably two-sided law that a large part of the kindly-disposed world
to-day are trying to get rid of, or to forget, on its severe and dark
side. But it is in fact a law that works even more necessarily and
inexorably than physical laws, inasmuch as it is the expression of
God's necessary moral being. God cannot 'let us off' the punishment of
our sins, which is only their inevitable fruit. Nor does He disclose
to us any necessary limit to the ruin which we may work in our being.
This stern principle of natural religion is taken up into, and indeed
intensified in, the gospel. {111} St. Paul, however, neither here nor
elsewhere uses 'immortality' to describe the future state of those whom
God condemns. He uses it only of God and of those who enjoy the vision
of God. The 'immortality of the soul'--the idea that every soul as
such necessarily and consciously exists to all eternity--is an idea
which the language of Scripture does not seem to warrant.
4. There are also two less prominent points in the second chapter that
we must not entirely pass over.
St. Paul, we should find, if we were to investigate the matter, is
wholly true in his interpretation of the Old Testament in general. He
interprets its spirit and meaning with perfect insight. But he is not
always what we should call critically exact, any more than the other
interpreters of his day, in his use of particular texts. Thus, in this
chapter he gives to some words of Isaiah[13] a meaning which is indeed
to be found elsewhere in the prophets[14], but does not really belong
to the original of this particular passage. Isaiah is saying that
God's name is being blasphemed _by the oppressors of {112}
Israel_--'Continually all day long my name is blasphemed.' But the
Greek version of the Bible inserted the words 'through you' (the
Jews[15]); and St. Paul interprets this insertion to mean that it was
the moral inconsistency of the chosen people themselves which caused
God's name to be blasphemed. Perhaps the fact that he uses the formula
of quotation 'as it is written' after the words referred to, is a sign
that he had employed the words in his own sense before he became
conscious that they were in fact a quotation. But in any case he shows
no anxiety to follow critically the original meaning of a particular
passage which he cites.
At the end of this passage occurs the antithesis familiar in modern
language of 'the letter and the spirit.' In its modern sense it is
used as equivalent to the literal and the metaphorical, or the definite
and the vague. But this is not at all its sense in St. Paul. With him
'the letter' means the written law, and 'spirit' means, in this
connexion, what we may broadly describe as vital moral energy. Thus,
{113} in its most characteristic use with St. Paul, the antithesis
distinguishes the mere external information as to God's will, which was
all the written law ('the letter') could give the Jews, from the
activity of the Holy Spirit or the spiritual power of moral freedom
which, through the gifts of the Holy Spirit, we enjoy under the gospel.
In this passage the antithesis is similar, but not the same. It
contrasts the merely physical state of circumcision according to the
written law--'with the letter and circumcision' means 'having the
written law and being accordingly circumcised'--with what the Old
Testament had called 'the circumcised heart,' i.e. the really obedient
will or 'spirit' which may exist independently of the outward rite.
'Spirit,' we observe, may refer to the activity of either the Holy
Spirit of God, or of the human will, or of both without discrimination.
[1] Cf. Eccles. viii. 11: 'Because sentence against an evil work is not
executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is emboldened
to do evil.' Ps. x. 11: 'He saith in his heart, God hath forgotten.'
Wisd. xi. 23: 'Thou overlookest the sins of men to the end they may
repent.' Ecclus. v. 4: 'Say not, I sinned, and what happened unto me?
For the Lord is longsuffering.' 2 Pet. iii. 9: 'The Lord is not slack
concerning his promise, as some count slackness; but is longsuffering
to youward, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should
come to repentance.' Cf. also Isa. lvii. 11.
[2] Or rather 'their own conscience bearing witness with them and, in
their mutual relations, their reflections accusing or even excusing
them.'
[3] It is certainly misplaced as it stands (John vii. 53-viii. 11).
[4] Mark xii. 40; Luke xx. 47; Matt. xxiii. 25.
[5] Cf. S. and H. _in loc._
[6] See for Seneca, Lightfoot, _Philippians_, 'St. Paul and Seneca,'
pp. 278-280.
[7] See _Pseudo-Heracleitus_, Letter ix, p. 91 (Bernays).
[8] Acts xvii. 28.
[9] See Rom. i. 32 as well as Rom. ii. 14.
[10] 'Conscience,' as used by St. Paul's contemporaries and by himself,
is not a repository for positive moral guidance, but rather a faculty
for reflecting upon our own already accomplished actions. See further,
app. note B, on the idea of conscience.
[11] See on this subject _Life and Letters of Dr. Hort_ (Macmillan),
vol. ii. p. 337: 'Faith itself, not being an intellectual assent to
propositions, but an attitude of heart and mind, is present in a more
or less rudimentary state in every upward effort or aspiration of man.'
Also Gibson, _Thirty-Nine Articles_ (Methuen), ii. p. 420.
[12] Rom. viii. 4.
[13] Isa. lii. 5.
[14] See in Ezek. xxxvi. 22: 'My holy name, which ye have profaned
among the nations, whither ye went.'
[15] Dr. Gifford suggests that the LXX was subsequently modified by St.
Paul's citation (as in the next chapter, iii. 10-18), instead of his
citation being moulded by the LXX. Is there any evidence in support of
this view?
{114}
DIVISION I. Sec. 3. CHAPTER III. 1-8.
_Jewish objections._
This passage is interesting as showing us, what is more often the case
than appears on the surface, that St. Paul has in mind as he reasons
the familiar objections of an opponent--his own objections, perhaps in
part, before he was a Christian. St. Paul, that is to say, very
frequently writes controversially, and argues _ad hominem_: and his own
reasoning is only rightly understood when we have clearly in view what
he is opposing. It of course very frequently happens in literature
generally that a saying is completely misunderstood, because that with
which it is contrasted is overlooked. Thus, John the Baptist's advice
to the soldiers to 'be content with their wages' is commonly
interpreted to mean--'Be satisfied with your wages {115} as they are,
and do not ask for more.' This might have been good advice or bad
advice to give to the soldiers, but it is not John the Baptist's. He
means, 'Be satisfied with your pay and do not supplement it by robbery
and unauthorized exaction.' Here then the implied contrast is
necessary to enable us to interpret aright the positive advice.
Similarly in the case of St. Paul, his doctrine of the absoluteness of
the divine election, as stated later in this epistle[1], has been
misunderstood, because it has been supposed that he is asserting the
divine absoluteness as against the claim of man to moral freedom, and
to equitable judgement in accordance with responsibility. But in fact
this is what he is indirectly vindicating. What he is arguing against
is the claim of the Jews that God was bound to their race. It is
against this claim--this immoral claim to perpetual privilege on the
part of one race, however they might behave--that St. Paul exalts the
absolute freedom of God to choose or reject as He sees fit. It is of
great importance then, especially with a writer so frequently
controversial as St. Paul, to watch continually to see which is the
phase of thought or feeling that {116} he is opposing. Frequently, as
I say, it hardly appears on the surface of St. Paul's writing that he
really has a definite opponent in view. Sometimes, as in the passage
now to be considered, it becomes apparent, and the argument is best
exhibited in the form of a dialogue (though to let the dialogue appear
clearly, missing links have to be supplied) thus--
_Jewish Objector._ But if all this is true--if Jews are no better off
than Gentiles--of what use is it to be a Jew? What is the value of our
circumcision and the position into which it initiates us? (ver. 1)
_St. Paul._ Its value is manifold. To take one point first[2], it
lies in the fact that the oracles of God--His teaching and
promises--were entrusted to our race (ver. 2).
_J. O._ But if God thus of old gave special promises to us as His
special people, and if now we are simply like the heathen under His
wrath, the conclusion is that He has been false to His promises
(argument implied in ver. 3).
_S. P._ No: that is not to be thought of. It is not God who has
played false, it is man: it is our race. The Jews refused to believe:
not however all of them, but some. If there is {117} a trial between
God and His people as to which has been true, it is God who must be
vindicated as the Psalmist says[3] (vers. 3, 4).
_J. O._ But if, as your teaching proves, all our unrighteousness is
made to serve as a background on which God makes His righteousness all
the more evident--that is enough. Our wrong-doing serves its purpose
in this way. God has no right both to use our wrong-doing for His own
purposes, and then, besides this, to visit His wrath upon us (ver. 5a).
_S. P._ Such thoughts our human nature suggests (ver. 5b). But we
know they are false. God is the judge of the world, and His action
necessarily supplies the standard of all judicial righteousness (ver.
6).
J. O. But do consider my point. If the result of my playing false to
God is that His fidelity is only thrown into higher relief and the
whole process ministers to His glory, why am I, the unconscious
instrument of His glory, treated as an offender? and why should I not
resolve to go on freely doing wrong (as you yourself are sometimes
accused of teaching), so as to give God more abundant opportunities to
overrule my action for the greater good? (vers. 7, 8a.)
{118}
_S. P._ A man stands justly condemned in the very using of such an
argument (ver. 8b).
What advantage then hath the Jew? or what is the profit of
circumcision? Much every way: first of all, that they were intrusted
with the oracles of God. For what if some were without faith? shall
their want of faith make of none effect the faithfulness of God? God
forbid: yea, let God be found true, but every man a liar; as it is
written,
That thou mightest be justified in thy words,