failure. There can be indeed to no thoughtful mind any doubt as to its
necessary function. Conscience, individual and social, is continually
going to sleep. It may be taken quite for certain that if Christ were
amongst us in manifest power by His Spirit to-day--as He ought to be in
the Church--our society as a whole would be smitten anew with a sense
of sin, and not least of social sin[7]. Our familiar excuses for our
selfish indulgence of our lusts, for our weak surrenders to passion and
impulse, for our commercial dishonesties, for our failures to carry
righteousness into politics, for our social injustices, for our
selfishness and {258} luxury, for our scamped and half-hearted
work--the familiar pleas of commercial or physical necessity, or
political exigencies, or lack of knowledge, or absence of
responsibility, or the influence of heredity--would dry up and wither
on our lips under the powerful glare of the divine 'letter'--Thou
shalt, Thou shalt not. God hath not 'given any man license to sin,' He
hath given no man exemption from the trouble or the suffering or the
loss involved in doing right. The obligation is peremptory to be just,
to be merciful, to be honest, to be self-denying, to be pure. And if
we do not care to take the trouble to be so, the only alternative is to
have Christ for our adversary, and find at last the horrible depth of
meaning which His words contain--'Thus and thus have ye made void the
word of God by your tradition.' 'Inasmuch as ye did it not, depart, ye
cursed, into eternal fire!' 'It is good for thee to enter into the
kingdom of God maimed or halt or with one eye, rather than having two
hands or feet or eyes to be cast into hell, where their worm dieth not
and the fire is not quenched.' These and the like words are
metaphorical--but metaphors which are intended to teach the heart only
the more vividly because they are metaphorical.
{259}
Indeed, in each age, and therefore in ours, most fertile of excuses, we
need the letter to kill us; the stern, outward, unmistakable
announcement of God's will to assure us that God does not change with
our whims or feelings, and cannot accommodate Himself to immoral
necessities. In each age, and therefore in ours, most capable of moral
self-deception, we need continual and forcible reminders that a quiet
conscience is no adequate guarantee of agreement with God, unless we
have taken pains to keep our conscience enlightened by meditating on
the divine word.
And if St. Paul's account of the function of 'the law' is true, so also
is his account of its necessary failure. It is obviously true if you
confine 'the law' to meaning what in the tradition of the Pharisees it
had come to mean, or what in his ideal way of thinking St. Paul defined
it to mean--that is, not the whole Old Testament with its anticipations
in prophecy and psalm of the temper of sonship and its evangelical
forecasts of the new covenant, but bare precept, expressing externally
and unmistakably the will of God. Mere law, instructing men truly and
searchingly as to God's requirement in thought as well as word and
deed, instructing {260} men and challenging them, and doing nothing
more, is so manifestly incomplete an expression of God's relation to
man, quite apart from all question of its ritual elements, that it can
in the nature of things serve only a temporary purpose in the
conscience, by leading us to a truer knowledge of Him who terrifies
indeed, but only in order to reassure, and kills but only in order to
raise to life again.
ii.
At this point it is necessary to answer the two much-disputed
questions--and it is possible to do it briefly--Is St. Paul, in giving
this summary of moral experience, speaking 'of himself or of some other
man'? and--Is the struggle described in verses 14-24 to be regarded as
occurring without or within the frontiers of the regenerate state?
There is no doubt that St. Paul must be in part really describing an
experience through which he passed. He was really, we may imagine,
'alive without the law once' in the sense that he was brought up a
happy Jewish child, under the law but not deeply feeling the terror of
its claims, until he was growing towards {261} the 'independent' period
of life and found himself confronted with its requirements in detail.
There need be no doubt that he is speaking of some experience of his
own when he alludes, here as elsewhere, to the deceitfulness of sin;
and when he describes the two stages of moral progress--the first, in
which the conscience of the man is awakened to recognize that his
habitual practice is not in any full sense controlled by his reason and
will; and the second, in which the will is deliberately enlisted on the
side of good, and the man only made thereby the more conscious that his
will is in no real control of his actions, but that he is the captive
of the alien power of sin. In some sense, though St. Paul does not
give us the materials for saying exactly in what sense, he must have
passed through these stages of experience. He must have really felt
himself the slave of sin, though the sin was of a sort which left him,
'as touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless.' He
must have felt that he could not do what he ought; and the bitterness
of his persecuting zeal may have been in part the reflection of this
sense of impotence.
And so far as St. Paul is speaking of himself, there can be no shadow
of doubt that the state {262} of conflict lay almost wholly outside his
conversion and regeneration. It was 'prevenient grace'--God's dealing
with him before he acknowledged Christ--that set his will so strongly
to desire and approve the right; and his new personal faith in Jesus,
and the might of the Spirit of Jesus to whom he became united, gave him
the power to do what he had so long and so ineffectually been willing.
This was his experience, and he bears witness to it. Even though he
would have made no claim to sinlessness after his conversion, yet the
sense of sin which possessed him so strongly, which made him call
himself 'not worthy to be called an apostle,' 'less than the least of
all saints,' and 'chief of sinners,' was in the main a memory of what
was past. The present sense was the consciousness of power in Christ.
It is inconceivable that St. Paul should describe himself, while a
Christian, as 'sold under sin.' And it was an idea of human corruption
quite different from St. Paul's which prevented Augustine and Calvin
from recognizing that either a pious Jew, or a Gentile which had not
the law, could be moved by the divine Spirit to 'rejoice in the law of
God after the inner man' (ver. 22), quite independently of any
knowledge of Christ.
{263}
But if St. Paul is in a real measure autobiographical in this passage,
there is no reasonable doubt that he is not merely so. He has
generalized his experiences to represent the moral experiences of the
race. The 'I' is the human individual in general. Thus 'alive without
the law,' if it can in a certain sense describe what St. Paul had once
been, describes much better the state of men--Greeks and Romans, or men
all the world over 'before the law came'--who had an easy social
standard and lived natural lives without any troublesome moral ideals,
and were wholly unvisited by conscientious scruples or the terrors of
the divine holiness. Upon such men comes the severer knowledge of the
righteousness of God through the teaching of some prophet or founder of
religion. It may come to men collectively in a nation or group, and
result in some general movement of conscience. Or it may come to an
individual through some circumstance which confronts him with a higher
moral claim than he has ever faced before--through the example of a
friend, through a book or a sermon. To many in St. Paul's day the
synagogues, where 'Moses had in every city them that preached him,' had
been the means of their awakening to the moral {264} claim of God. And
whenever men are thus confronted with the divine law of righteousness,
in a more or less perfect form and with more or less of impressiveness
laying its prohibitions upon them--'Thou shalt not do this or that'--if
they do not harden their hearts to it, they pass through the stages of
experience which St. Paul has so admirably idealized. There is that in
them which the prohibitions of the divine law stimulates into
antagonism. They become conscious of a power which beguiles or cheats
them into breaking the law; they awake to the sense of sin and failure
to do God's will, and find that they are not their own masters, but are
drifting under the impulse of what is not themselves. There awakens in
them the conscience and will to approve and choose what is right, and
with that a 'self-contempt bitterer to drink than blood,' as they
realize that though they approve and choose the right they cannot do
it. Thus the conviction is strengthened that their true selves are on
the side of God and right, and that which holds them captive is an
alien tyranny which has got its lodgement in their lower nature.
This is the psychological moment for the arrival of the gospel. The
man who simply {265} desires the right and is paralyzed by his own
impotence to realize it in his own strength, out of the depth of his
despair learns that God is not a taskmaster and judge, but a Father;
that He is not his adversary, but is on his side; that if he will
simply surrender himself to the divine love, as it is made evident in
Christ, all his past failures and sins are as if they had never been,
and for the future God will not teach him from outside and leave him to
struggle alone, but will work in him to will and to do His good
pleasure. Then the sense of moral impotence may pass into the sense of
power in Christ. And in proportion as any man's actual life-history,
or the history of any group of men, corresponds to this ideal sketch,
the period of moral struggle and failure may fall in the main outside
the regeneration and new life in Christ.
But, almost from the beginnings of Christianity, and increasingly as
Christianity has become popular, men have been 'christened' in infancy
or in mature life without the moral issue having been defined or the
moral will awakened. An ordinary Englishman, for example, is baptized
in infancy. This means that he is actually regenerate and introduced
into {266} the body of Christ. In rare cases he is so brought up as to
realize this, and corresponds so willingly with the teaching that he
lives the life of the regenerate from the first, and never, except in a
very refined form, knows the sense of impotence or passes through the
period of hopeless struggle. He has never found God's commandments
grievous. But in most cases there is no such pains taken to enlighten
the young conscience, or no such readiness of correspondence. The man
lives as his surroundings suggest--a decent enough life, very likely,
and more or less honourable, but never in face of the full divine law.
And such an one is 'alive without the law.' For him all the
experiences St. Paul describes are still to come, inside the circle of
his actual regeneration. And they may be very gradual and slow, and
may repeat themselves, more or less, innumerable times. St. Paul's is
an ideal picture; but the intended issue is always the same. When we
find ourselves saying, 'To will is present with me, but to do that
which is good is not,' we may be quite certain that we are not
realizing the power of our new birth. We are as men whom God has as
yet only externally visited. We are conscious of our own weakness and
of the {267} strength of evil; but not of the third force, stronger
than either ourselves or the power of evil, which is at our disposal if
we will draw upon it. What is needed is a deliberate and whole-hearted
realization that we are in Christ and Christ is in us by His Spirit; an
unconditional surrender of faith to Him: a practice, which grows more
natural by exercise, of remembering and deliberately drawing by faith
upon His strength in the moments of temptation and not merely upon our
own resources. 'In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth I will do thus
and thus.' So we too may form like St. Paul the habit of victory. We
too may cry in sober earnest 'It is no longer I that live (in my naked
self), but Christ that liveth in me.' 'I thank God through Jesus
Christ our Lord.'
When that sense of struggle or failure which St. Paul describes occurs,
as is generally the case with us traditional Christians, in the process
of our awakening to the knowledge of the new birth, we may in a sense
say that the struggle is part of the process of regeneration[8]; but
the word 'regeneration' best describes, not a process, but a single
divine act upon us and in {268} us[9], and this single divine act is
consistently identified in the New Testament with our baptism, though
it is only realized by our moral conversion when we awake to claim the
privileges of our new life.
iii.
There are two smaller points which claim notice.
We are reminded by the way in which St. Paul speaks of sin, in this and
other passages--as a force or power greater than the individual man,
which possesses him and dominates him through his lower nature--and
especially by the consciousness which he betrays of its 'beguiling'
power, that he believed in personal agencies of evil. 'Our wrestling
is not against flesh and blood (merely), but against the
principalities, against the powers, against the world-rulers of this
darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly
places[10].' Particularly it is in the deceitfulness of sin that St.
Paul realizes what one must call the personal character of the evil
power[11]. He is profoundly conscious that {269} there makes itself
heard in temptation a voice as of a person which lies to us, as it lied
to Eve, as to the true character of the suggested action; and when we
have been deceived and seduced, and have done the deed, and its real
character has become apparent, 'the tempter' turns round upon us with
the grin of unmasked malevolence. Is there any one who can really
dissociate from his own spiritual experience this idea of the tempter
and the deceiver?
We do well to remember in reading this passage the meaning of the
recurring word 'law.' In modern English it has come to mean the
principle or method observable in anything. Such and such a thing, we
say, exhibits such and such a law, i.e. acts constantly in such and
such a way. It is natural therefore for us to read this meaning into
the word in verse 21, as in the Authorized Version, 'I find then a law,
that, when I would do good, evil is present with me,' i.e. I find that
this is what constantly happens. But the Greek word, as used in the
Old and New Testaments, does not bear any meaning like this[12]. It
means always the {270} injunction or set of injunctions imposed by a
law-giver. In this passage it is used seven times of the divine
(Mosaic) law. When the will accepts this law and would impose it on
the lower nature, it becomes 'the law of the mind,' i.e. the law which
the mind enjoins (verse 23). With this conflicts 'the law of sin,'
'the different law,' which sin or the evil one would impose and which
has gained actual sway 'in our members.' We must then interpret verse
21 in harmony with this use, and taking the sentence to be a broken
one, translate, as the margin of the Revised Version, 'I find then, in
regard of the law, that, to me who would do good, evil is present.'
[1] 'I was myself in both [flesh and spirit], but more myself in what I
approved than in what I disapproved.'--Augustine, _Confessions_, viii.
5.
[2] Rather, as margin, 'I find then in regard of the law': see below,
p. 269.
[3] Cf. 1 Cor. xv. 56; Gal. iii. 10; 2 Cor. iii. 6; Rom. iii. 20; iv.
15; v. 20.
[4] See J. B. Mayor in _The Epistle of St. James_ (ii. 10), p. 86.
[5] Gal. v. 3.
[6] Phil. iii. 6.
[7] It is disappointing, I think, that the grave appeal to the Church
as regards social duty, made by the bishops assembled at Lambeth last
year in commending to the notice of us all the report of their
Committee on Industrial Problems, has received such scant attention,
except from a certain group of Churchmen who were already occupied with
the problem. It might have been expected that this solemn appeal would
have vastly widened the area of attention.
[8] 'Inter regenerandum.' St. John will not speak of a wilful sinner
as truly 'begotten of God,' 1 John iii. 9; v. 18, &c.
[9] See Dale, quoted in Ephesians, p. 86.
[10] Eph. vi. 12.
[11] Cf. 2 Thess. ii. 9-11: 'The working of Satan with all ... deceit
of unrighteousness ... a working of error, that they should believe a
lie.' 2 Cor. xi. 14: 'Satan fashioneth himself into an angel of
light.' 1 Tim. ii. 14: 'The woman being beguiled hath fallen into
transgression.' Cf. Heb. iii. 13: 'The deceitfulness of sin.'
[12] It never appears to be used, as in classical Greek, for 'custom,'
either in LXX or N.T.
{271}
DIVISION III. Sec. 7. CHAPTER VIII. 1-11.
_Life in the Spirit._
If we were to represent the Epistle to the Romans as a _bas relief_,
there would be two passages which would have to stand in the highest
relief--the end of the third chapter, in which St. Paul speaks of that
free justification which is given to all men on the equal basis of
faith in Christ the propitiation for their sins; and this eighth
chapter, in which he speaks of the triumph which belongs to the life of
the justified, lived in the power of Christ's Spirit.
The note of this chapter is struck in the words 'no condemnation' at
the beginning--'There is therefore now no condemnation to them that are
in Christ Jesus.' St. Paul knew so well what it was to be conscious of
being under condemnation. He had never been what we should call a
sinner. He had always been a man who, according to the standards of
the {272} Pharisaic righteousness, was pre-eminently righteous; he had
always been a man who did much for religion. But he had known, in a
form in which it is known to very few of us, what it was to be
conscious of being under God's condemnation. God had been to him as a
taskmaster over against him, breaking in upon his life with continual
and searching warnings as to the divine requirements, with continual
threatenings and continual terrors; and he had been as one standing
over against God with the consciousness that, do as he might, he could
never satisfy, or climb up to the level of, the requirements of the
righteous God. There was always the haunting sense that he fell
short--always the haunting sense that he was on his trial, and on that
trial was condemned. But now all had been changed; and that by a
process which in a certain sense was as simple as possible, but than
which nothing could be more fundamental and deep. All was changed
because the relation had begun at the other end. No longer was there a
climbing up of man to God, no longer the effort of a Saul to commend
himself to God. The relationship had begun at the other end, at God's
end. Or rather, what had begun was the realization on the man's {273}
part of the true order. For God had been beforehand with Saul all
along. All the time that he was striving, working, slaving to commend
himself to a God whose righteousness he could never attain to, God was
waiting there for him to find out his mistake--waiting to reveal
Himself as no hard taskmaster, but as the Creator, the Father of his
spirit. The process had now begun anew from the other side. God had
simply of His own pure initiative manifested His love. He had sent His
Son out of His own essential being into this world as it was, not
asking whether it was a fit world for the Son to enter into; but taking
it simply as it was, because it appealed to the divine compassion by
the very multitude of its sins and the very vastness of its need, God
had sent forth His only begotten Son out of the bosom of His love and
of His pure initiative; had sent Him to take this nature of ours upon
Him, in it to make atonement for us with God, and in it, raised from
death and glorified, to be the source of a new and spiritual life, such
as should triumph over sin in all who will believe in Him. That is the
great point. It was all purely God's doing: a pure disclosure and act
of God, who showed Himself ready to take {274} men as they were, to
forgive them and entrust them with the divine Spirit, if they would
only trust Him. God is no longer the taskmaster over against men, with
His threats and His terrors. He is the Father who has given His Son,
who has given men a sacrifice whereby He can forgive their sins, and
has given them the Spirit of His Son into their hearts. God is on
their side, and they are on God's side. That is the great change. And
the object of it all is that what formerly seemed so unattainable might
now be the very thing that proved itself practicable--to live according
to God; that the requirement of the law might be no longer an
impossible claim over us, terrorizing us with its perpetual threats,
but that by the power of the new life in which we live, 'the
righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after
the flesh, but after the spirit.'
The following is a paraphrase of the passage we are now to study:--
The result then of all that has been said is that the divine verdict of
guilty, which went forth over men on account of their sins--that
'disclosure of divine wrath' which St. Paul had so profoundly felt and
interpreted--hangs no longer over those who have passed into the new
{275} life in Christ Jesus. In the old life, sin with its attendant
death held sway over us and gave the law to our actions. But we were
freed from that despotism in passing under a new and stronger
authority. It is the divine Spirit, by whom we have been brought into
the life in Christ, who now controls us. Of old the Mosaic law was
powerless to help us. It could inform us of God's will, but it could
not enable our poor weak human nature to keep His requirements. But
God has provided an effective remedy for this state of things. He has
sent His own Son to take our nature upon Him, and come in among our
sinful race without any apparent difference between us and Him. He put
Him simply among us and in our position, to be the sacrifice for sin;
and thereby did for us what we had so failed to do for
ourselves--passed effective sentence of condemnation on sin, and that
in our own nature. [Do we ask how sin was condemned? The answer is,
it stood condemned by the perfect sacrifice of reparation for sin,
which the sinless Man made to the divine character on our behalf, when
at the requirement of obedience He shed His blood. It stood condemned,
still more fully, by the fact that God raised Him from the dead and
exalted {276} Him far beyond the reach of sin, to the glory of His
right hand, and made Him the head of a redeemed manhood, and poured
forth His Spirit to be the new life of all that believe in Him][1].
And the object of this mission of the Son, and this judgement on sin in
His person, was the creation of that new humanity to which we belong,
which lives not under the control of human appetite, but under the
control of Spirit: and because it so lives, in the life of Another,
succeeds in the one point where man had hitherto failed, in keeping the
righteous requirements of the divine law. Our new way of life,
therefore, is contrasted with the old in its whole tone. For just as,
if we live in fact under the control of our weak manhood with its wants
and appetites, our mind and conscious aim is directed to minister to
its purposes, so in the same way if our life is in fact controlled by
Spirit, our conscious aim also is directed to spiritual purposes. And
the two lives are contrasted no less markedly in their prospects.
{277} The mind controlled by human appetites is under the doom of
death, temporal and eternal. The mind controlled by the Spirit is in a
state of life, so far as concerns itself, and of peace towards God.
The mind controlled by human appetites is under the doom of death
because it is at war with God. It does not, it cannot, keep His
commandments. Those therefore who so live in their own strength
merely, cannot please Him. But that is not now our state. We now live
in the power of Spirit, since the Spirit of God and Christ--that is,
Christ Himself--dwells in us. To have Him is the very meaning of being
a Christian. Not to have Christ's Spirit, that is Himself, dwelling in
us, is not to belong to Him. But if He does dwell in us, then, though
the body must still pay the debt of death, because of sin to which it
has belonged--nay though it is already as good as dead--yet the Spirit
within us is a superior principle of life, because of the divine
righteousness which it bestows upon us. And this life shall triumph
over death in our case, as in Christ's. For God, who raised up Christ
from the dead, shall also by the working of the divine Spirit which
dwells in us, give life again even to our bodies, though now they are
subject to death.
{278}
There is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ
Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus made me free
from the law of sin and of death. For what the law could not do, in
that it was weak through the flesh, God, sending his own Son in the
likeness of sinful flesh and _as an offering_ for sin, condemned sin in
the flesh: that the ordinance of the law might be fulfilled in us, who
walk not after the flesh, but after the spirit. For they that are
after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are
after the spirit the things of the spirit. For the mind of the flesh
is death; but the mind of the spirit is life and peace: because the
mind of the flesh is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the
law of God, neither indeed can it be: and they that are in the flesh
cannot please God. But ye are not in the flesh, but in the spirit, if
so be that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you. But if any man hath not
the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. And if Christ is in you, the
body is dead because of sin; but the spirit is life because of
righteousness. But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the
dead dwelleth in you, he that raised up Christ Jesus from the dead
shall quicken also your mortal bodies through his Spirit that dwelleth
in you.