question that these beautiful phrases which, if St. John's witness be
true, represent the teaching of Christ Himself[14], express also what
is most central in St. Paul's idea of Christianity. It was the great
merit of Matthew Arnold's _St. Paul and Protestantism_[15] that it
{220} recalled the fact to notice in ordinary educated circles. Recent
scientific study of St. Paul has gone in the same direction. The
doctrines of atonement and justification are essential to St. Paul's
theology, but not central: the doctrine of life in Christ, spiritual
and moral identification with Christ, is both essential and central.
The maintenance of this life of union is again, as Matthew Arnold
teaches us, the final and most developed function of faith--'that
Christ may dwell in our hearts by faith'; for faith is, or grows to be,
such devotion to Christ's person as desires to lose itself and its
selfish aims in Him and His work. But Matthew Arnold strangely leaves
out of sight the two-sidedness of this relation: we abide in Christ by
faith, {221} because Christ first of all abides in us by His
loving-kindness and grace. It is His love, always beforehand with
us--not merely to forgive us our sins, but to pour itself out in the
communicated Spirit--that takes us up within the circle of His own
life; it is the act of God incorporating us into Christ which evokes
and makes possible the response of our faith to realize His indwelling
and make the adhesion mutual. God's gift is prior to our response and
the ground of it; and moreover God's gift is permanent and abiding. It
would indeed be a thought of despair if the bond between Christ and us
depended upon the continuous energy of our faith to maintain it. Nay,
it is always there--unintermittent through all our broken efforts and
vicissitudes of will--always there for us to recur to. We are to
reckon ourselves 'dead to sin and alive to righteousness,' because and
only because we are also to reckon ourselves 'in Christ.' That is our
permanent state, and it is the function of faith not to create, but to
realize it.
It is St. Paul's clear and vivid perception of a divine gift given, a
relationship to God established by God's act, not ours, and that at a
particular time, which is closely connected with his {222} sacramental
teaching. If a divine gift is to be given (1) definite at a definite
time, (2) to men of body as well as spirit in a world not only
spiritual but material, (3) publicly as to members of a social
organization--it is most natural that the gift should be embodied in an
outward rite and outward vehicle. So St. Paul appears to think. There
is no shrinking about his sacramental language. It can be said with
justice that certain forms of sacerdotal or ecclesiastical government
which have appeared in Church history would to his mind have savoured,
or more than savoured, of bondage to men and bondage to the 'beggarly
rudiments' of ceremonial observances. St. Paul is very jealous of
maintaining what we may call spiritual individuality and personal
liberty. But there is no justification to be found in St. Paul's
epistles for saying that he connects sacramentalism--i.e. the idea of
necessary spiritual gifts divinely promised on the occasion, and
through the medium, of certain outward religious rites of a
community--with that 'bondage' to 'beggarly rudiments' of which he has
so great a dread. St. Paul's language does not admit of our supposing
that he knew of any other way of admission 'into Christ' except through
the gate {223} of baptism, or any other means of communion in Christ's
body and blood except 'the breaking of the bread.'
3. It will be necessary before we leave this great passage to give
some special attention to three phrases.
'_Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father_.' In the
New Testament the sacrifice of Christ, the atonement won by Christ, is
continually ascribed to the Father, acting through and in the Son--'God
was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself.' So also the
resurrection is uniformly ascribed to the Father's power acting in the
case of the Son[16]. Our current Christian language has in both cases
departed too widely from apostolic practice. The doctrine of the Holy
Trinity would be more intelligently held, and the worship of the Church
more normally offered in the Spirit through the Son to the Father, if
we had not fallen into the habit of so speaking of the action of the
Son in dying and rising as habitually to leave out of sight the truth
that His action, as Son, is and {224} must always be the Father's
action through Him; and that reversely our worship of the Son must
always be really, and ought to be in our habitual consciousness, the
worship of the Father through Him.
'_Our old man was crucified with him_.' As Shelley said that, when
Adonais died, ''tis death is dead, not he,' so in an infinitely deeper
sense St. Paul says that what was killed upon the cross was (he does
not say 'instead of Christ,' but 'with Christ') sin and the 'old man.'
The 'old man' means the old way of living, or rather the old way of
living considered as having been appropriated by the sinful individual
and thus made his own self. Thus it was the old self that was put to
death on the cross, and a new self came to life, which was the same in
unchanged personality and yet so practically different in all its
relationships, that it could assert and claim exemptions from the
obligations contracted by the 'old man.'
'_That the body of sin might be done away_.' The identification of sin
with the individual had been specially with his body. His bodily
appetites and impulses and parts had been so used to the ways of sin as
to become a 'body of sin,' and this, St. Paul says, has to be 'done
away' or {225} annulled. It is not that we are to harm the body
itself: for the body itself is good, and is to be offered, with all its
members, to become the weapon of Christian warfare. There is indeed no
material thing as such that is evil. The 'body of sin' means exactly
'the body considered as having become the receptacle of sin': as when
our Lord speaks of the 'mammon of unrighteousness[17],' He means money
which has become the instrument of unrighteousness, but which the
children of light are to convert to profitable uses. 'To annul the
body of sin' means, therefore, almost the same as 'to annul sin in the
body' and leave the body free; but it emphasizes the fact that sin has
got such hold of the body that to annul sin involves annulling the
body: as St. Paul says elsewhere, 'I buffet' (or 'distress') 'my body
and bring it into bondage[18].'
[1] See Gal. v. 13: 'Only use not your freedom for an occasion of the
flesh.' Cf. 2 Pet. iii. 16, and the implications of St. James' Epistle.
[2] 1 Thess. iv. 14.
[3] The meaning of ver. 4 is interpreted in vers. 10, 11.
[4] Ver. 4; cf. John xi. 40. 'The glory of God' is specially manifest
in the resurrection of the dead.
[5] This is the original suggestion of the word 'united' in ver. 5.
[6] Cf. Col. ii. 12.
[7] The Greek words represented by 'leave at the disposal of,' 'make an
offering to,' are different parts of the same verb. 'The tense of the
former expresses continuance, habit; ... of the latter, a single
irrevocable act of surrender' (Vaughan, _in loc._).
[8] John xii. 24, 25.
[9] It is one gain of the R.V. that for 'ye are dead' (Col. iii. 3, ii.
20), 'we are dead' (Rom. vi. 2, 8), &c., we read 'ye died,' 'we died,'
i.e. at the definite moment of baptism.
[10] Gregory of Tours, _Hist. Franc._ ii. 31: 'To whom (Chlovis) as he
enters the font to be baptized, the holy man of God (Remigius) thus
eloquently spoke--"Meekly bow thy neck, Sigambrian: adore what thou
hast burnt; burn what thou hast adored."'
[11] Baptism by 'affusion' began within the first century, but as the
exception, not the rule. See app. note F.
[12] By infant baptism under right conditions, I mean the baptism of
infants when there is some real security provided, through their
parents or proper sponsors, for their Christian education, according to
the intention of the Church. On the primitive origin of infant
baptism, see _Ephesians_, pp. 230, 231.
[13] 'Stirb und werde!
Denn so lang du das nicht hast,
Bist du nur ein trueber Gast
Auf der dunkeln Erde' (quoted by M. Arnold).
[14] John vi. 53-58; xiv. 19, 20; xv. 1-10; xvii. 21-23.
[15] P. 81 (2nd ed.): 'The three essential terms of Pauline theology
are not, therefore, as popular theology makes them--_calling,
justification, sanctification_: they are rather these--_dying with
Christ, resurrection from the dead, growing into Christ_.' Cf. p. 76:
'How did Paul's faith, working through love, help him [to control
appetite and self-will]? It enabled him to reinforce duty by
affection. In the central need of his nature, the desire to govern
these motives of unrighteousness, it enabled him to say: _Die to them_!
_Christ did_. If any man be in Christ, said St. Paul--that is, if any
man identifies himself with Christ by attachment, so that he enters
into His feelings and lives with His life--he is a new creature; he can
do, and does, what Christ did.' It would be truer, surely, to say in
the first of these two passages not 'the three _essential_,' &c., but
'the three _central_.' Nothing can be more truly essential to Pauline
theology than the terms, calling, justification, atonement; but the two
last of them at least do not belong to the central region of religion,
but have to do with the removal of preliminary obstacles to our
entrance upon it.
[16] The apparent exception is John x. 18; but even there the word
rendered 'take' would perhaps be better rendered 'receive.' Christ had
the right to lay down His own life and the right to receive it again
from the Father. So Hort, _First Ep. of Peter_, pp. 34, 84.
[17] Luke xvi. 9.
[18] 1 Cor. ix. 27.
{226}
DIVISION III. Sec. 4. CHAPTER VI. 15-23.
_The perfect freedom is God's service._
The reiterated mention of the deliverance of the Christian from the
yoke of the law--'Ye are not under law, but under grace'--brings up the
excuse for licentious living in a new form:--'This very abolition of
the strict power of the law in favour of a system of which the ruling
principle is God's goodness, at least makes one willing to contemplate
any particular act of sin[1], with a good hope of escaping punishment.'
St. Paul meets the suggestion with a 'God forbid,' and then gives a
deep reason for repudiating it, a reason however which is but a version
of our Lord's saying, 'Every one that committeth sin is the slave of
sin[2].' Every man is always acting under obedience. What he {227}
does in a particular case represents an act of obedience to some
master; that is to say, a taking service with him. Moreover it appears
on reflection that it must be with one of two masters and cannot be
with both, for 'no man can serve two masters.' It is either with sin,
whose service ends in spiritual as well as physical death, or with Him
to whom obedience is properly due, whose service ends in righteousness.
What gives St. Paul reason for thankfulness in thinking of the
conversion of the Christians at Rome, is not that those who became
Christians became thereby exempt from obedience, but that they changed
their allegiance from sin to Christ. At their conversion they gladly
submitted to a pattern or standard of teaching--the teaching of
Christ--to which they were handed over for the fashioning of their
lives--that is to say, they were made free from sin only to become
slaves to righteousness. He uses the word slavery because so long as
their weak flesh shrinks from divine obedience, they must recognize
that the life which is really liberty must be accepted even as a
bondage, till it cease to seem so. In old days they offered their
limbs as slaves to uncleanness and lawlessness, and the result was a
lawless life. {228} Now they must yield their limbs as slaves to
righteousness with a view to a consecrated life. And the change of
allegiance is surely matter for congratulation. They can recall the
days when they were free from the service of righteousness, as being
slaves of sin, and they can remember what fruit they enjoyed as the
result of experiences which they now blush to bring to mind. Of such
experiences death, moral no less than physical, is the result. Now,
set free from sin's slavery and made God's slaves, they enjoy the
present fruit of consecration to God and the ultimate prospect of
eternal life. So long as Sin was their master he would pay them their
wages, and the wages which Sin pays is always death. But now that they
are surrendered into God's hands, and simply dependent on His
loving-kindness, there is no question of wages, but the gift of His
bounty is eternal life, in Him whose life includes their own, Jesus
Christ their Lord.
What then? shall we sin, because we are not under law, but under grace?
God forbid. Know ye not, that to whom ye present yourselves _as_
servants unto obedience, his servants ye are whom ye obey; whether of
sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness? But thanks be to
God, that, whereas ye were servants of sin, ye became obedient from the
heart to that form of teaching {229} whereunto ye were delivered; and
being made free from sin, ye became servants of righteousness. I speak
after the manner of men because of the infirmity of your flesh: for as
ye presented your members _as_ servants to uncleanness and to iniquity
unto iniquity, even so now present your members _as_ servants to
righteousness unto sanctification. For when ye were servants of sin,
ye were free in regard of righteousness. What fruit then had ye at
that time in the things whereof ye are now ashamed? for the end of
those things is death. But now being made free from sin, and become
servants to God, ye have your fruit unto sanctification, and the end
eternal life. For the wages of sin is death; but the free gift of God
is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
1. St. Paul is here expounding the real meaning of human liberty. It
is generally regarded as the power 'to do as one pleases' or a state of
independence. But such a state does not exist. There is indeed such a
thing as the absence of external control up to a certain point. That
is an element of liberty, but it reaches but a little way. The true
liberty is the power to realize one's nature and make the best of
oneself--the power to be what one ought to be or is meant to be. The
instinct of language, as applied to man, recognizes this. When we see
a drunkard, we recognize a man the balance of whose nature is upset.
The higher part of his nature is being dragged at the chariot-wheels of
his lower. So, {230} be he never so free a citizen, we call him a
slave--a slave of drink. On the same principle we speak of the slaves
of lust or the slaves of money or the slaves of fashion or the slaves
of popularity. By these phrases we describe various moral states in
which some external or purely animal force dominates a man, and he
loses his self-control, and his whole nature becomes disordered. The
true order of human nature is that a man's body should be controlled by
his will. Then he is self-determined. His whole life is the
expression of a rational principle. He makes the best of himself. He
is free to be a real man, according to the proper idea of manhood.
But how can this be? Can this reason or rational will in man stand and
work of itself? Is it so constructed as to be independent? No. Just
as truly as a man's bodily forces are drawn from sources outside
himself, so his spiritual being depends on sources and motives beyond
himself.
What does man's 'freedom of will' consist of? Speaking exactly, it
consists of a power to _direct_ a certain amount of physical force
which passes into one's bodily frame, and to let it go out in one or
another form of action, deed or word or {231} thought, more or less
moral or immoral, spiritual or carnal. And this liberty of direction,
when more closely examined, is found to consist in a power which the
will has to choose between motives which present themselves as ideas to
the mind and to hand itself over to one or the other. Some of these
motives are derived from physical or worldly appetites; some are
derived through the conscience or faculty of spiritual apprehension.
If, in cases where the lower motives conflict with the higher, a man
still yields himself to the latter, his life is spiritual; and it is so
because it is determined by motives and reinforced by influences which
come from beyond himself, and are in fact the motives and forces of the
Spirit of God. But in neither case is he independent and free from
obedience. He stands at a meeting-point of the spiritual and material
world, and must be governed by one or the other. In either case man's
life is played upon and dominated by motive-forces, infinitely vaster
and mightier than himself. Let him try (as he has tried) to forget his
necessary dependence--to detach himself from the higher obedience and
to 'be as God,' independent--and he falls necessarily under the
dominion of the lower forces, of his flesh or of the world. If he is
to cease {232} to live below himself, he must consent to surrender to
what is above himself. He must yield his spirit to the divine Spirit,
which is its natural master. So he ceases to be carnal, or governed by
the flesh, and becomes spiritual, or governed by the divine Spirit.
And that is liberty. 'That man,' said Leo the Great, 'has true peace
and liberty whose flesh is controlled by the judgement of his mind, as
his mind is directed by the government of God[3].' God's service, and
that only, is perfect freedom.
Man then is so constructed that he can only cease to fall below himself
by being raised above himself. His life cannot fail to be stamped with
the impress of sin unless it is stamped with the impress of God. The
state of the Christian, surrendered to the fashioning of God, is that
true dependence which is the true liberty. Independent of God, man
stands at last over against God to get what his independent action has
merited; and that is penal death, the inevitable outcome of misused
faculties, enslaved to sin. Surrendered to God in faith, on the other
hand, he receives into his nature, through all its open portals, the
inflooding tide of divine love; and enters, enriched and uplifted, into
the life that {233} is eternal, the life which he shares with Jesus,
the life that is truly human and really divine.
It is of great practical importance that we should get a just idea of
what our freedom consists in. There are men who, under the impulse of
a purely materialist science, declare the sense of moral freedom to be
an illusion. This is of course a gross error. But what has largely
played into the hands of this error is the exaggerated idea of human
freedom which is ordinarily current, an idea which can only be held by
ignoring our true and necessary dependence and limitation. It is this
that we need to have brought home to us. There is an admirable story
among George Crabbe's Tales, called 'The Gentleman Farmer.' The hero
starts in life resolved that he will not put up with any bondage. The
orthodox clergyman, the orthodox physician, and orthodox matrimony--all
these alike represent social bondage in different forms, and he will
have none of them. So he starts on a career of 'unchartered freedom,'
'To prove that _he alone was king of him_.'
And the last scene of all represents him the weak slave of his
mistress, a quack doctor, and a revivalist--'which things are an
allegory.'
{234}
2. The phrase 'a form' or 'pattern of teaching,' is interesting. It
suggests the idea of the Church as holding a 'pattern of sound
words[4],' a definite body of instruction, which is to form the life of
each person who gives himself over to her loving discipline. Christian
faith is not a formless impulse; it is self-surrender to a corporate
life ruled on a definite model of religious and moral teaching. What
St. Paul has here chiefly in mind is moral teaching. But the moral
teaching was inseparable from religious facts and motives. Nor is it
difficult to ascertain from the allusions of the New Testament what the
subjects were in which the first Christians were orally instructed, or,
in other words, what constituted 'the tradition' which lies behind the
written books of the New Testament. It comprised instruction in (1)
the facts of our Lord's life, death, and resurrection[5]; (2) the
meaning of sacred rites--baptism, laying on of hands,
eucharist[6]--including the Lord's Prayer[7]; (3) the moral duties of
'the way,' and the doctrine 'of the resurrection of {235} the dead and
of eternal judgement[8]'; (4) the meaning of 'the Name of the Father,
and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost[9].' On all these subjects the
books of the New Testament do not give the primary instruction, but
imply that it has been already given.
3. The word rendered 'sanctification' (vers. 19, 22) is one which
needs to have its primitive force restored to it[10]. The 'saint' is
the person set apart for the worship and service of God. What is here
translated 'sanctification' means literally (1) 'the process of being
made fit for such worship and service,' that is, consecration as of a
priest; or (2) by a slight transition of meaning, the result of such
consecration, i.e. 'holiness.'
[1] The tense of the verb in 'shall we sin' appears to indicate an act,
not a habit of sin.
[2] John viii. 34.
[3] _Serm._ xxxix. 2.
[4] 2 Tim. i. 13.
[5] Cf. Luke i. 1-4; 1 Cor. xi. 23; xv. 3, 4.
[6] Cf. Rom. vi. 3; Heb. vi. 1-6; 1 Cor. x. 15, 16; xi. 23 ff.; Acts
ii. 38.
[7] _Didache_, 8; cf. below, p. 293.
[8] Heb. vi. 1, 2; 1 Thess. iv. 1, 2; v. 2.
[9] See Hort, _First Ep. of Peter_, p. 18, for the fact that 'a
recognized belief or idea [of the threefold Name] seems to be
everywhere presupposed.'
[10] Cf. above, pp. 31, 32.
{236}
DIVISION III. Sec. 5. CHAPTER VII. 1-6.
_Freedom from the law by union with Christ._
St. Paul is full of two thoughts. The first is that of life out of
death, living by dying. He had lived an old life in which 'those
multitudinous motions of appetite and self-will which reason and
conscience disapproved, reason and conscience could yet not govern, and
had to yield to them. This, as we shall see, is what drove Paul almost
to despair[1].' He had passed to a new life in which he found in
actual, blessed experience that he could do the thing that he would.
He could do all things--through Christ that strengthened him. For it
was Christ who had been the means of transferring him from the old life
to the new, and that by His own way of dying to live. Christ Himself
had lived 'by the Spirit' deliberately and always. He {237} had never
failed morally to do the thing that He would. But so violent was the
antagonism between His life of divine obedience (with the claims that
it involved upon other men) and 'the sinful, wilful, weak world around,
that the world could not tolerate His presence in it; and it came to
this--that He could only live by the Spirit at the cost of dying to the
world, i.e. choosing to be put to death sooner than give up obedience
to His Father. He chose to die, and thus dying He lived through death
in the life of the Spirit, and was raised again from death in body
also. Now Christ had brought St. Paul--as He would bring all men--into
union with His new life, and by the same method. St. Paul had had to
die to the sinful world in order to live to God. But he, being not
only a man but a sinner, was obliged not only, like Christ, to die to
sin in the world--he had also to die to sin in himself. In other
words, he had to 'crucify his flesh with its affections and
lusts'--that is, 'his old man' or old way of living. He had, by the
help of Christ's Spirit, to assert his inner self or personality
against a false self--a false way of life--which had appropriated him
and held him captive. Only by being emancipated from the {238} 'old
man' could he come to live 'in Christ.' It is this transference from
the 'old man,' or old way of life, to the new, by means of a death that
St. Paul here describes under the figure of a second marriage. The
man's true self was as a wife married to 'the old man.' The old man
was nailed to Christ's cross (vi. 6)--that is, the old way of life was
put an end to, even with violence. Thus the wife, the human
personality, is, according to the law of marriage, free to contract a
second union with Christ, the second Man. This is one of the main
thoughts in St. Paul's mind.