attention in this connexion to the fact that St. Paul's doctrine of
Christ as the second Adam of necessity involves in some form His
miraculous birth. St. Paul indeed says nothing about Christ's nativity
of {201} the Virgin as an event in history; but he conceives of the
Christ as a fresh start in manhood, a new man, who yet drew the
substance of His manhood from the old stock, for He was 'born of a
woman,' and 'of the seed of David.' There is thus physical continuity
between the old Adam and Christ, and yet, from the moral point of view,
the break is complete. The inheritance of sin which has followed, and
must according to natural law follow, physical descent, is quite cut
off. Christ is man of our old substance and yet new man, wholly free
from any taint of sin. This involves a new creative act upon the
manhood of Christ in its source. It involves something strictly
miraculous conditioning the continuity of His descent from David.
There is continuity, and yet a break in continuity. And this is
exactly what the strongly-attested fact of the Virgin birth--whatever
be the physiological account which is to be given of it--is calculated
to supply. It presents us with a Christ born of a woman, of the
substance of our nature, and yet only so constituted by a new creative
act of God.
5. It will of course be noticed that the drift of St. Paul's argument
in this passage is directly towards universal salvation, for 'the many'
{202} means 'the whole mass.' This is the case in other places where
he is considering what we may call the natural tendency and scope of
the gospel, 'As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made
alive.' But there are passages of a different tendency in St. Paul's
epistles, where he is considering the human attitude towards the
purpose of God; and there he appears to emphasize strongly the power of
the human will to refuse the light and turn God's blessing into a
curse. If the 'savour' of the apostle's preaching is to 'those who are
being saved a savour proceeding from life and tending to life,' even
eternal life, it is for the wilful who are perishing in their
wilfulness 'a savour as from death and tending to death': for they
shall 'suffer punishment, even eternal destruction from the face of the
Lord, and from the glory of his might[22].' What this eternal
destruction means, and how it is to be harmonized with the vision of
unity, we cannot precisely tell. Verily, 'we know' but 'in part.' But
at least we must recognize that St. Paul asserts both sides of the
picture: and that the 'terror' and the hope are not dissociable.
6. We must also notice, before we leave the {203} passage, that the
application of the word justification receives a certain extension. As
the 'grace' of God is associated with a 'gift of righteousness[23],'
that is to say, of real fellowship in the life of God, so the
preliminary 'justification of sinners,' in which the divine grace first
of all conspicuously shows itself, is to pass into a 'justification of
life' (or 'a justification taking effect in life'); that is to say, the
actual life is to become acceptable. God begins with accepting sinners
and dealing with them as if they were righteous if only they will
believe. But it is in view of a moral process which is to produce a
new life, and is to end in making acceptable not themselves only, in
spite of their lives, but their life itself. The object of the
justifying faith is, and must be, as we saw, a living person. It is
Christ who was 'raised again for our justification.' And the living
Christ can be satisfied with nothing short of a living fellowship
between us and Himself in His own life and spirit.
[1] An _a fortiori_ argument means an argument with a 'still more' in
it:--If something is so then _still more_ something else.
[2] The words in brackets are the suppressed premise in the
argument--suppressed, but none the less evident.
[3] Acts xvii. 26.
[4] ver. 20.
[5] ver. 13, 14, 19.
[6] 1 Cor. xi. 3; 1 Tim. ii. 13-15.
[7] Rom. iv. 15; v. 13.
[8] Much more (the argument implies) after the law had been given and
sin could be 'imputed' as sin again.
[9] The references in Hos. vi. 7, Isa. xliii. 27, Job xxxi. 33, are not
certainly, or even probably, to Adam. There is an obscure but
interesting reference in Ezek. xxviii. 14-16, in which 'the fall' seems
to be treated as representative of Tyre's fall, and presumably
therefore of all situations in which divine gifts and vocations are
squandered and lost.
[10] Wisd. ii. 23, 24; cf. Rom. v. 12.
[11] Ecclus. xxv. 24. The first clause need not mean more than 'she
was the first to sin.'
[12] 2 Esdras iii. 7.
[13] _Apoc. Baruch_ xxiii. 4, and elsewhere. In parts of this book the
penalty of Adam's sin is regarded as being not death, but _premature_
death: see liv. 15, lvi. 6, and Mr. Charles' notes.
[14] See Matt. vii. 11; John ii. 25; iii. 3, &c.
[15] 2 Esdras iii. 21, 22; iv. 30; vii. 48.
[16] The matter is to be dealt with more at length in app. note E.
[17] See E. B. Tylor in _Encycl. Brit._ ii, _s.v._ ANTHROPOLOGY, p.
114: 'The polygenist view (i.e. the doctrine of a plurality of origins)
till a few years since was gaining ground. Two modern views, however
(i.e. the belief in the antiquity of man and the development of
species), have tended to restore, though under a new aspect, the
doctrine of a single human stock.' Cf. Darwin, _Descent of Man_ (2nd
ed.), p. 176: 'Those naturalists who admit the principle of evolution
... will feel no doubt that all the races of men are descended from a
single primitive stock.' See also Keane in app. note E.
[18] Mozley's _Lectures and Theol. Papers_ (Longmans), pp. 157 ff.
[19] 2 Tim. i. 10.
[20] John vi. 50; viii. 51.
[21] See app. note E.
[22] 2 Thess. i. 7-10; 2 Cor. ii. 16.
[23] ver. 17.
{204}
DIVISION III. Sec. 3. CHAPTER VI. 1-14.
_The Christian life a living by dying._
It has now been made apparent that belief in Christ introduces a man
into a new sphere of 'life in Christ' or 'state of grace'--a state,
that is, in which the divine grace or goodwill is the atmosphere and
motive force. And just as with his natural life he inherited all the
taint and curse attaching to sin in the unredeemed manhood, so now in
his new state he receives from Christ all the bountiful outpouring, not
of acquittal only, but of divine life. What he is called to witness is
the triumph of the divine goodwill over the old forces and tendencies
of sin in himself and in the world.
But now a monstrous suggestion presents itself, akin to that attempt of
the Jew (of which we heard in chapter iii) to claim exemption from the
divine judgement on his own sins on the ground that Jewish
unfaithfulness had but given {205} God a background upon which to
reveal Himself and His righteousness more effectively. St. Paul, we
saw, indignantly crushed that attempt to use logic against conscience.
Now, however, a similar suggestion makes itself heard, only from the
side not of Jewish factiousness, but of Gentile lawlessness. Would it
not give divine grace a still better opportunity to show its quality
if, now that we are Christians, we go on living our old life of sin?
The more it has got to forgive in us, the more superabundant will its
mercy appear. Shall we not then continue in sin that grace may abound?
We have other reasons, besides this passage, for believing that St.
Paul's teaching about divine grace and justifying faith not only
admitted of being misunderstood, but was misunderstood, in his own
time[1] as at later periods, in such a way as to cut the roots of moral
effort. 'Unlearned and unstable men were wresting his words to their
own destruction.' And to any lawless suggestions based upon the misuse
of God's free grace, St. Paul had already given the easiest answer when
he had laid it down {206} as an absolutely universal truth that God
will at last 'render to every man according to his works ... to them
that are factious and obey not the truth but obey unrighteousness,
wrath and indignation, tribulation and anguish, upon every soul of man
that worketh evil'; or when he had met the developed logic of the
self-excusing Jew with the sharp and final rejoinder--'whose
condemnation is just.'
Here however St. Paul gives not the easiest answer to the antinomian
suggestion, but a deep, fruitful, and decisive one. He demonstrates
the absolute incompatibility of principle between the life of sin and
the Christian state. By the very nature of the case no man can belong
to both. As St. John said, 'he that is begotten of God' in the new
life in Christ 'cannot sin' without thereby abandoning his new
standing-ground. At the moment when we became Christians by the act of
baptism, we said good-bye to the old life of sin as completely as a
dying man says good-bye to the familiar scenes and passes over to
'yonder side.' We were admitted by baptism into Christ Jesus; that is,
we were admitted into a certain sort of human life with a certain law
or character. What is then the character and law of Christ's life?
'We believe that {207} Jesus died and rose again[2].' That is the
central and summary fact about Him. He passed to life through death.
And this physical death of His on the cross was not merely a fact in
history, it was a fact with a moral significance[3]. While He had been
in this sinful world of ours He had borne its sin, but had no part in
it. He was in the sinful world, but not of it. He was to sin and all
its motives as one dead. And by His physical death upon the cross He
gave summary expression to this moral alienation. He made a final and
outward breach with sin, and passed out of its range, for evermore
'separated from sinners.' 'He died to sin once for all.' And the
glory of the Father[4] broke forth from its customary concealment and
vindicated the Christ by raising Him from the dead, because of what His
death had morally meant.
Thus the 'likeness,' or moral counterpart, of Christ's death is to be,
like Him, dead to sin. And if we are not called to be physically
crucified, we are called to its moral counterpart. We must become
morally 'of one growth' with {208} Christ's death[5], like the slip
with the tree it is grafted into. Only so can we share the new life of
His resurrection. This is represented in the very ceremony of our
baptism. It was impressed upon us by all its outward symbolism that to
become a Christian we must die to the old life. We were brought to the
margin of the water as to a death, and descended, bowed beneath the
waves, as into the tomb with Christ: in order so, and only so, as
having died and been buried, to emerge again into the new life under
the conditions of which henceforth we are to conduct ourselves[6]. And
this new life is not only an actual present fellowship in the risen
Christ (ver. 4): it expects to become so (ver. 5) in a fuller and
completer measure, but always on the basis of one and the same clear
conviction, which we may express thus--When Christ was nailed to the
cross, our old sinful manhood was nailed there with Him, so that
henceforth our animal nature, hitherto the haunt and stronghold of sin,
might be paralyzed and rendered as powerless as any crucified criminal,
and we, set free to become new men, might no longer be sin's slaves.
That old sinful self of {209} ours was put to death, and we passed, as
new men, into another life. Henceforth the tyrant sin has no claim on
us, for death closes all scores and acquits of all claims. 'The man is
dead' is a summary and final plea against all claimants, and that is
our plea against the claim of sin. We have died to it once and for
all. Therefore, and only therefore, we can hope to share the deathless
glory of Christ's resurrection. He died once, and passed henceforth
altogether out of death's control. For the death that He died was to
make an end with sin, and that was done once for all. Henceforth there
is nothing left but life, and that life in the eternal God. This
therefore is the view we are to take of ourselves as now included in
Christ: we are, in regard to sin, dead men who are no longer responsive
to its impulses or alive to its interests: and therefore, in regard to
God, we are alive in Christ to whom we are united.
And (ver. 12) the practical duty which follows from this is plain.
Christians must not acknowledge a tyrant whose strength and power is
gone for ever, by letting sin still reign in the lower part of their
nature--the body still subject to physical death--and so bring their
higher nature into an unnatural subjection to its appetites: they must
{210} not leave the limbs of their redeemed selves at the disposal of
the dethroned king Sin, to be used as weapons for the warfare of
iniquity. No: they must correspond to the privileges of the new life
in God into which they have passed, by making an offering of
themselves[7] to God, with all the free will which befits those who
were dead and are alive again; and an offering also of their limbs, now
restored to their own control, as weapons for God's warfare of
righteousness. Sin shall no longer be their lord. That despotism
belonged to the days when they were under the law. Now it is not the
law they are under, but the sovereignty of the divine goodwill.
What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may
abound? God forbid. We who died to sin, how shall we any longer live
therein? Or are ye ignorant that all we who were baptized into Christ
Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him
through baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised from the
dead through the glory of the Father, so we also might walk in newness
of life. For if we have become united with the likeness of his death,
we shall be also with the likeness of his resurrection; knowing this,
that our old man was crucified with _him_, that the body of {211} sin
might be done away, that so we should no longer be in bondage to sin;
for he that hath died is justified from sin. But if we died with
Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him; knowing that
Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death no more hath
dominion over him. For the death that he died, he died unto sin once:
but the life that he liveth, he liveth unto God. Even so reckon ye
also yourselves to be dead unto sin, but alive unto God in Christ Jesus.
Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey
the lusts thereof: neither present your members unto sin as instruments
of unrighteousness; but present yourselves unto God, as alive from the
dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God. For
sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under law, but
under grace.
1. In the analysis of the passage given above, the order of the ideas
has been somewhat altered, and their meaning expanded, with the
intention of rendering the real argument more intelligible; while I
believe that no idea is suggested that is foreign to the original. The
passage, however, is extraordinarily condensed, and is full of some of
the most characteristic of St. Paul's thoughts--amongst them that of
the life in Christ as being a living by dying, or a life out of death.
It is impossible to try to lead a human life under any standard that
can be called moral without knowing that it involves some sort of
'mortification' of selfish and sensual appetites. There {212} is that
in human nature which, as moralists generally must recognize and in
fact have in a measure recognized, must be 'done to death.' It was
this principle that was expressed with such terrible vigour by our Lord
when He bade us pluck out the offending eye and cut off the offending
hand. But the novelty in Christianity was the emphasis which it laid
rather on the living than on the dying; it was its teaching as to the
infusion into human life of a new and positive spiritual force, which
was to overcome evil with good and swallow up death in victory. It was
by their belief in a gift of the Spirit imparted to them, and by their
resulting power to think and act freely according to God, that the
Christians were distinguished from the rest of the world. It is this
upon which their apostolic teachers continually insist. 'I have
written unto you young men, because ye are strong.' 'As many as are
lead by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God.' It is only as it
were in the second place that it appears that this living in the new
life will involve dying to an old one. Thus the dying is always made
to appear to be in order to a living. The end is always the life. 'I
came that they may have life,' our Lord had said, 'and have it
abundantly.'
{213}
The phrases about dying in order to live have their root in our Lord's
teaching, as St. John represents it[8], but belong most
characteristically to St. Paul. The principle which they enforce
belongs only to a fallen world, for it is only the sin within us and
about us that has to be put to death, or to which we have to die. But
it finds its highest exemplification in the case of Christ who, sinless
Himself, came into a world of sin and lived under its conditions.
Therefore He had to 'die' to sin and selfishness in the world in order
to 'live' in His own proper life to God. And this dying to sin--this
refusing it and repudiating it--is summarily represented in His death
upon the cross. The worldly world killed Him because He would have
none of its selfishness and sin. He, by voluntarily dying sooner than
surrender to the demands of this world, made a final separation of
Himself from sin. Thus He lived His life to God at the cost of dying.
And this law of Christ's life is to be the law of ours. We must die to
sin--not on a visible cross, but by a repudiation of it as thorough and
real: nor to sin outside us only, but to sin in ourselves. It is only
to express this attitude toward sin in ourselves in other {214} words,
to say that we have to mortify and crucify our own carnal and selfish
selves.
And just as Christ summed up His attitude towards the world by His
death upon the cross, so the Christian's attitude to the world was
summed up in his baptism. At that moment he died to the world of
sin[9]. This state of deadness to sin has to be constantly renewed, or
again and again recovered. But it was in that sacramental moment
realized in principle and symbolically represented. The convert who
was immersed beneath the baptismal waters and emerged again, realized
easily that this 'bath of regeneration' was, what the early Christians
called it, 'his grave and his mother.' All the circumstances of his
baptism forced it upon him that he had passed out of an old life into a
new--that he died to one state of things and came to life in another.
The Christians of St. Paul's churches, like newly-made Christians in
Central Africa or India to-day, were very often highly imperfect; but
they knew--they could not but know--that they had passed under a new
allegiance; that like the just-converted Frankish {215} idolater, they
must 'burn what they had adored, and adore what they had burned[10].'
We in our generation, and in a country where Christianity has become
traditional, realize this much less easily. It is not only that we
have, in our Church and country, almost wholly lost the symbolism which
belongs to baptism by immersion[11]; though that is as great a loss as
any symbolic action, not necessary to the administration of a
sacrament, can be. It is not only that we are as a general rule
baptized in infancy, for that under right conditions[12] embodies a
fundamental Christian principle and comes down from the origin of
Christianity. It is much more that Christianity has been allowed to
become conventional and cheap. It requires no effort or moral courage
to own, in a formal sense, the name of Christ. The result is that
masses of {216} men belong to the Church who are in practice living
purely worldly lives, and that the Church and the world are fused
together. Hence it follows again that what the majority of Christians
do is supposed to represent a tolerable manner of life for an ordinary
Christian, who does not profess to be better than his neighbours.
Under these circumstances there is nothing which is more important than
to reassert the law of life through death as the only Christian law of
living. The 'old man' is as vigorous as ever. The world is still
gratifying its sensual appetites and grasping after wealth without
regard to the law of God. Malice, jealousy, and hatred are alive and
flourishing. God is still being ignored, refused, blasphemed. That is
to say, the world of sin is still what it always was. It is still
under the same unchangeable wrath of God; and still therefore to live
to God is only possible for one who will, and that deliberately and
persistently, die to the world. The renunciation must be conscious and
deliberate. The mortification and crucifixion of the 'old man' and
'the body of sin' must be painful, at times even agonizing. A
reasonable Christian will be indeed surprised if something painful is
not being continually required of him. And a reasonable Christian
{217} rejoices to purchase, even by great sacrifices, the pearl of
great price, which is fellowship with Christ:--'that he may know him
and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his
sufferings, being made conformable unto his death.' This is the point.
It is not enough for us to be baptized. Our baptism is evacuated of
all meaning unless we are also 'being converted,' or 'turning' from the
world to God; unless we are turning our back upon its lawless lusts,
its worldly ambitions, its graspings after money, its refusals of pain,
its selfish and unloving life. Nay: all this renunciation was already
involved in the Name spoken over us at our baptism. The Christian name
pledges us to the Christian law of living by dying, progress by
conversion. You cannot refuse the dying without repudiating the Name.
'Die and re-exist,' said Goethe, 'for so long as this is not
accomplished thou art but a troubled guest upon an earth of gloom[13].'
'Reckon ye, therefore, yourselves to be dead unto sin.' This phrase,
addressed to common Christians, supplies a magnificent instance of St.
Paul's idealism, that is to say, of his love of {218} considering
things, and his desire that others should consider things, in the light
of their central and dominant idea or principle--as they ought to be
rather than as they are. This is his continual practice: to idealize
not in the sense of thinking unreally of things, but in the sense of
thinking of them in the light of that which is most fundamental in
them. It is in this way that he thinks of 'the world,' or godless
human society, and seems to represent it as worse than it sometimes
appears, because its governing principle is radically evil. It is in
this way that he thinks of the Church, and speaks of it in terms of
glory not justified by the facts simply as they appear; because it has
that at work within it which is capable of transforming it until it not
only is, but looks like, the body of Christ, or the city of God. This
idealizing method is naturally distasteful to English common sense in
most departments of thinking, and perhaps particularly in the region of
religion. But we suffer from an over-close adhesion to the 'matters of
fact' or 'the things which do appear.' We do not think of our life,
ourselves, our church according to the divine principle which they
embody, or 'according to the pattern shown to us in the mount.' Thus
{219} we are never uplifted, enlarged, ennobled by the vision of
... The gleam,
The light that never was on sea or land.
That light never was or is manifest on the surface of actual
experience, and yet it is always latent--the touch of glory in common
things, the radiance in even our dim world, 'the master light of all
our seeing.' We have almost all of us got to learn the practical power
of the Christian imagination, disciplined and spiritually enlightened,
to enrich and ennoble actual life. The objects which our imagination
should reflect are realities, but realities not yet developed. What
our imagination should do for us is to teach us to see things not as
they are, but as they are coming to be.