he is enabled to taste, see, hear, and feel God.' There is nothing
practical and solid here. A company of Cornish revivalists will have no
difficulty in tasting, seeing, hearing, and feeling God, twenty times
over, to-night, and yet may be none the better for it to-morrow morning.
When Paul said, _In Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth anything
nor uncircumcision, but faith that worketh through love; Have faith in
Christ!_ these words did not mean for him: 'Give your hearty belief and
consent to the covenant of grace; Accept the offered benefit of
justification through Christ's imputed righteousness.' They did not
mean: 'Try and discern spiritual things, try and taste, see, hear, and
feel God.' They did not mean: 'Rest in the finished work of Christ the
Saviour.' No, they meant: _Die with him!_
The object of this treatise is not religious edification, but the true
criticism of a great and misunderstood author. Yet it is impossible to
be in presence of this Pauline conception of faith without remarking on
the incomparable power of edification which it contains. It is indeed a
crowning evidence of that piercing practical religious sense which we
have attributed to Paul. It is at once mystical and rational; and it
enlists in its service the best forces of both worlds,--the world of
reason and morals, and the world of sympathy and emotion. The world of
reason and duty has an excellent clue to action, but wants motive-power;
the world of sympathy and influence has an irresistible force of
motive-power, but wants a clue for directing its exertion. The danger of
the one world is weariness in well-doing; the danger of the other is
sterile raptures and immoral fanaticism. Paul takes from both worlds
what can help him, and leaves what cannot. The elemental power of
sympathy and emotion in us, a power which extends beyond the limits of
our own will and conscious activity, which we cannot measure and
control, and which in each of us differs immensely in force, volume, and
mode of manifestation, he calls into full play, and sets it to work with
all its strength and in all its variety. But one unalterable object is
assigned by him to this power: _to die with Christ to the law of the
flesh, to live with Christ to the law of the mind_.
This is the doctrine of the _necrosis_,[62]--Paul's central doctrine,
and the doctrine which makes his profoundness and originality. His
repeated and minute lists of practices and feelings to be followed or
suppressed, now take a heightened significance. They were the matter by
which his faith tried itself and knew itself. 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 have seen, is what drove Paul almost to
despair. Well, then, how did Paul's faith, working through love, help
him here? It enabled him to reinforce duty by affection. In the central
need of his nature, the desire to govern these motions of
unrighteousness, it enabled him to say: _Die to them! Christ did._ If
any man be in Christ, said 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;[63] he can do, and does, what
Christ did. First, he suffers with him. Christ throughout his life and
in his death presented his body a living sacrifice to God; every
self-willed impulse blindly trying to assert itself without respect of
the universal order, he died to. You, says Paul to his disciple, are to
do the same. Never mind how various and multitudinous the impulses are;
impulses to intemperance, concupiscence, covetousness, pride, sloth,
envy, malignity, anger, clamour, bitterness, harshness, unmercifulness.
Die to them all, and to each as it comes! Christ did. If you cannot,
your attachment, your faith, must be one that goes but a very little
way. In an ordinary human attachment, out of love to a woman, out of
love to a friend, out of love to a child, you can suppress quite easily,
because by sympathy you enter into their feelings, this or that impulse
of selfishness which happens to conflict with them, and which hitherto
you have obeyed. _All_ impulses of selfishness conflict with Christ's
feelings, he showed it by dying to them all; if you are one with him by
faith and sympathy, you can die to them also. Then, secondly, if you
thus die with him, you become transformed by the renewing of your mind,
and rise with him. The law of the spirit of life which is in Christ
becomes the law of your life also, and frees you from the law of sin and
death. You rise with him to that harmonious conformity with the real and
eternal order, that sense of pleasing God who trieth the hearts, which
is life and peace, and which grows more and more till it becomes glory.
If you suffer with him, therefore, you shall also be glorified with him.
[Footnote 62: II _Cor._, iv, 10.]
[Footnote 63: II _Cor._, v, 17.]
The real worth of this mystical conception depends on the fitness of the
character and history of Jesus Christ for inspiring such an enthusiasm
of attachment and devotion as that which Paul's notion of faith implies.
If the character and history are eminently such as to inspire it, then
Paul has no doubt found a mighty aid towards the attainment of that
righteousness of which Jesus Christ's life afforded the admirable
pattern. A great solicitude is always shown by popular Christianity to
establish a radical difference between Jesus and a teacher, like
Socrates. Ordinary theologians establish this difference by
transcendental distinctions into which science cannot follow them. But
what makes for science the radical difference between Jesus and
Socrates, is that such a conception as Paul's would, if applied to
Socrates, be out of place and ineffective. Socrates inspired boundless
friendship and esteem; but the inspiration of reason and conscience is
the one inspiration which comes from him, and which impels us to live
righteously as he did. A penetrating enthusiasm of love, sympathy, pity,
adoration, reinforcing the inspiration of reason and duty, does not
belong to Socrates. With Jesus it is different. On this point it is
needless to argue; history has proved. In the midst of errors the most
prosaic, the most immoral, the most unscriptural, concerning God,
Christ, and righteousness, the immense emotion of love and sympathy
inspired by the person and character of Jesus has had to work almost by
itself alone for righteousness; and it has worked wonders. The
surpassing religious grandeur of Paul's conception of faith is that it
seizes a real salutary emotional force of incalculable magnitude, and
reinforces moral effort with it.
Paul's mystical conception is not complete without its relation of us to
our fellow-men, as well as its relation of us to Jesus Christ. Whoever
identifies himself with Christ, identifies himself with Christ's idea of
the solidarity of men. The whole race is conceived as one body, having
to die and rise with Christ, and forming by the joint action of its
regenerate members the mystical body of Christ. Hence the truth of that
which Bishop Wilson says: 'It is not so much our neighbour's interest as
our own that we love him.' Jesus Christ's life, with which we by faith
identify ourselves, is not complete, his aspiration after the eternal
order is not satisfied, so long as only Jesus himself follows this
order, or only this or that individual amongst us men follows it. The
same law of emotion and sympathy, therefore, which prevails in our
inward self-discipline, is to prevail in our dealings with others. The
motions of sin in ourselves we succeed in mortifying, not by saying to
ourselves that they are sinful, but by sympathy with Christ in his
mortification of them. In like manner, our duties towards our neighbour
we perform, not in deference to external commands and prohibitions, but
through identifying ourselves with him by sympathy with Christ who
identified himself with him. Therefore, we owe no man anything but to
love one another; and he who loves his neighbour fulfils the law towards
him, because he seeks to do him good and forbears to do him harm just as
if he was himself.
Mr. Lecky cannot see that the command to speak the truth to one's
neighbour is a command which has a natural sanction. But according to
these Pauline ideas it has a clear natural sanction. For, if my
neighbour is merely an extension of myself, deceiving my neighbour is
the same as deceiving myself; and than self-deceit there is nothing by
nature more baneful. And on this ground Paul puts the injunction. He
says: 'Speak every man truth to his neighbour, _for_ we are members one
of another.'[64] This direction to identify ourselves in Jesus Christ
with our neighbours is hard and startling, no doubt, like the direction
to identify ourselves with Jesus and die with him. But it is also, like
that direction, inspiring; and not, like a set of mere mechanical
commands and prohibitions, lifeless and unaiding. It shows a profound
practical religious sense, and rests upon facts of human nature which
experience can follow and appreciate.
[Footnote 64: _Eph._, iv, 25.]
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_.[65] The order in
which these terms are placed indicates, what we have already pointed out
elsewhere, the true Pauline sense of the expression, _resurrection from
the dead_. In Paul's ideas the expression has no essential connexion
with physical death. It is true, popular theology connects it with this
almost exclusively, and regards any other use of it as purely figurative
and secondary. For popular theology, Christ's resurrection is his bodily
resurrection on earth after his physical death on the cross; the
believer's resurrection is his bodily resurrection in a future world,
the golden city of our hymns and of the Apocalypse. For this theology,
the force of Christ's resurrection is that it is a miracle which
guarantees the promised future miracle of our own resurrection. It is a
common remark with Biblical critics, even with able and candid Biblical
critics, that Christ's resurrection, in this sense of a physical
miracle, is the central object of Paul's thoughts and the foundation of
all his theology. Nay, the preoccupation with this idea has altered the
very text of our documents; so that whereas Paul wrote, 'Christ died and
lived,' we read, 'Christ died and rose again and revived.'[66] But
whoever has carefully followed Paul's line of thought as we have
endeavoured to trace it, will see that in his mature theology, as the
Epistle to the Romans exhibits it, it cannot be this physical and
miraculous aspect of the resurrection which holds the first place in his
mind; for under this aspect the resurrection does not fit in with the
ideas which he is developing.
[Footnote 65: +apothanein syn Christô+, _Col._, ii, 20; +exanastasis
ek nekrôn+, _Philipp._, iii, 11; +auxêsis eis Christon+, _Eph._, iv,
15.]
[Footnote 66: _Rom._, xiv, 9.]
Not for a moment do we deny that in Paul's earlier theology, and notably
in the Epistles to the Thessalonians and Corinthians, the physical and
miraculous aspect of the resurrection, both Christ's and the believer's,
is primary and predominant. Not for a moment do we deny that to the very
end of his life, after the Epistle to the Romans, after the Epistle to
the Philippians, if he had been asked whether he held the doctrine of
the resurrection in the physical and miraculous sense, as well as in his
own spiritual and mystical sense, he would have replied with entire
conviction that he did. Very likely it would have been impossible to him
to imagine his theology without it. But:--
Below the surface-stream, shallow and light,
Of what we _say_ we feel--below the stream,
As light, of what we _think_ we feel--there flows
With noiseless current strong, obscure and deep,
The central stream of what we feel indeed;
and by this alone are we truly characterised. Paul's originality lies in
the effort to find a moral side and significance for all the processes,
however mystical, of the religious life, with a view of strengthening,
in this way, their hold upon us and their command of all our nature.
Sooner or later he was sure to be drawn to treat the process of
resurrection with this endeavour. He did so treat it; and what is
original and essential in him is his doing so.
Paul's conception of life and death inevitably came to govern his
conception of resurrection. What indeed, as we have seen, is for Paul
life, and what is death? Not the ordinary physical life and death.
Death, for him, is living after the flesh, obedience to sin; life is
mortifying by the spirit the deeds of the flesh, obedience to
righteousness. Resurrection, in its essential sense, is therefore for
Paul, the rising, within the sphere of our visible earthly existence,
from death in this sense to life in this sense. It is indubitable that,
so far as the human believer's resurrection is concerned, this is so.
Else, how could Paul say to the Colossians (to take only one out of a
hundred clear texts showing the same thing): '_If ye then be risen with
Christ_, seek the things that are above.'[67] But when Paul repeats
again and again, in the Epistle to the Romans, that the matter of our
faith is 'that God raised Jesus from the dead,' the essential meaning of
this resurrection, also, is just the same. Real life for Paul, begins
with the mystical death which frees us from the dominion of the external
_shalls_ and _shall nots_ of the law.[68] From the moment, therefore,
that Jesus Christ was content to do God's will, he died. Paul's point
is, that Jesus Christ in his earthly existence obeyed the law of the
spirit and bore fruit to God; and that the believer should, in his
earthly existence, do the same. That Christ 'died to sin,' that he
'pleased not himself,' and that, consequently, through all his life
here, he was risen and living to God, is what occupies Paul. Christ's
physical resurrection after he was crucified is neither in point of time
nor in point of character the resurrection on which Paul, following his
essential line of thought, wanted to fix the believer's mind. The
resurrection Paul was striving after for himself and others was a
resurrection _now_, and a resurrection to _righteousness_.[69]
[Footnote 67: _Col._, iii, 1.]
[Footnote 68: See _Rom._, vii, 1-6.]
[Footnote 69: It has been said that this was the error of Hymenæus
and Philetas (II _Tim._, ii, 17). It might be rejoined, with much
plausibility, that their error was the error of popular theology,
the fixing the attention on the past miracle of Christ's physical
resurrection, and losing sight of the continuing miracle of the
Christian's spiritual resurrection. Probably, however, Hymenæus and
Philetas controverted some of Paul's tenets respecting the
approaching Messianic advent and the resurrection then to take place
(I _Thess._, iv, 13-17). If they rejected these tenets, they were
right where Paul was wrong. But if they disputed and separated on
account of them, they were _heretics_; that is, they had their
hearts and minds full of a speculative contention, instead of their
proper chief-concern,--_putting on the new man_, and the imitation
of Christ.]
But Jesus Christ's obeying God and not pleasing himself culminated in
his death on the cross. All through his career, indeed, Jesus Christ
pleased not himself and died to sin. But so smoothly and so inevitably,
as we have before said, did he always appear to follow that law of the
moral order, which to us it costs such effort to obey, that only in the
very wrench and pressure of his violent death did any pain of dying, any
conflict between the law of the flesh and the law of the spirit, in
Christ become visible. But the Christian needs to find in Christ's dying
to sin a fellowship of suffering and a conformity of death. Well, then,
the point of Christ's trial and crucifixion is the only point in his
career where the Christian can palpably touch what he seeks. In all
dying there is struggle and weakness; in our dying to sin there is great
struggle and weakness. But only in his crucifixion can we see, in Jesus
Christ, a place for struggle and weakness.[70] That self-sacrificing
obedience of Jesus Christ's whole life, which was summed up in this
great, final act of his crucifixion, and which is palpable as sacrifice,
obedience, dolorous effort, only there, is, therefore, constantly
regarded by Paul under the figure of this final act, as is also the
believer's conformity to Christ's obedience. The believer is crucified
with Christ when he mortifies by the spirit the deeds of
unrighteousness; Christ was crucified when he pleased not himself, and
came to do not his own will but God's.
[Footnote 70: +estaurôthê ex astheneias+, II _Cor._, xiii, 4.]
It is the same with life as with death; it turns on no physical event,
but on that central concern of Paul's thoughts, righteousness. If we
have the spirit of Christ, we live, as he did, by the spirit, 'serve the
spirit of God,'[71] and follow the eternal order. The spirit of God,
the spirit of Christ is the same,--the one eternal moral order. If we
are led by the spirit of God we are the sons of God, and share with
Christ the heritage of the sons of God,--eternal life, peace, felicity,
glory. The spirit, therefore, is life _because of righteousness_. And
when, through identifying ourselves with Christ, we reach Christ's
righteousness, then eternal life begins for us;--a continuous and
ascending life, for the eternal order never dies, and the more we
transform ourselves into servants of righteousness and organs of the
eternal order, the more we are and desire to be this eternal order and
nothing else. Even in this life we are 'seated in heavenly places,'[72]
as Christ is; so entirely, for Paul, is righteousness the true life and
the true heaven. But the transformation cannot be completed here; the
physical death is regarded by Paul as a stage at which it ceases to be
impeded. However, at this stage we quit, as he himself says, the ground
of experience and enter upon the ground of hope. But, by a sublime
analogy, he fetches from the travail of the whole universe proof of the
necessity and beneficence of the law of transformation. Jesus Christ
entered into his glory when he had made his physical death itself a
crowning witness to his obedience to righteousness; we, in like manner,
within the limits of this earthly life and before we have yet persevered
to the end, must not look for full adoption, for the glorious revelation
in us of the sons of God.[73]
[Footnote 71: According to the true reading in _Philipp._, iii, 3.]
[Footnote 72: _Eph._, ii, 6.]
[Footnote 73: _Rom._, viii, 18-25.]
That Paul, as we have said, accepted the physical miracle of Christ's
resurrection and ascension as a part of the signs and wonders which
accompanied Christianity, there can be no doubt. Just in the same manner
he accepted the eschatology, as it is called, of his nation,--their
doctrine of the final things and of the summons by a trumpet in the sky
to judgment; he accepted Satan, hierarchies of angels, and an
approaching end of the world. What we deny is, that his acceptance of
the former gives to his teaching its essential characters, any more than
his acceptance of the latter. We should but be continuing, with strict
logical development, Paul's essential line of thought, if we said that
the true ascension and glorified reign of Christ was the triumph and
reign of his spirit, of his real life, far more operative after his
death on the cross than before it; and that in this sense, most truly,
he and all who persevere to the end as he did are 'sown in weakness but
raised in power.' Paul himself, however, did not distinctly continue his
thought thus, and neither will we do so for him. How far Paul himself
knew that he had gone in his irresistible bent to find, for each of the
data of his religion, that side of moral and spiritual significance
which, as a mere sign and wonder, it had not and could not have,--what
data he himself was conscious of having transferred, through following
this bent, from the first rank in importance to the second,--we cannot
know with any certainty. That the bent existed, that Paul felt it
existed, and that it establishes a wide difference between the earliest
epistles and the latest, is beyond question. Already, in the Second
Epistle to the Corinthians, he declares that, 'though he had known
Christ after the flesh, yet henceforth he knew him so no more;'[74] and
in the Epistle to the Romans, shortly afterwards, he rejects the notion
of dwelling on the miraculous Christ, on the descent into hell and on
the ascent into heaven, and fixes the believer's attention solely on the
faith of Christ and on the effects produced by an acquaintance with
it.[75] In the same Epistle, in like manner, the kingdom of God, of
which to the Thessalonians he described the advent in such materialising
and popularly Judaic language, has become 'righteousness, and peace, and
joy in the holy spirit.'[76]
[Footnote 74: II _Cor._, v, 16.]
[Footnote 75: _Rom._, x, 6-10.]
[Footnote 76: _Rom._, xiv, 17.]
These ideas, we repeat, may never have excluded others, which absorbed
the most part of Paul's contemporaries as they absorb popular religion
at this day. To popular religion, the real kingdom of God is the New
Jerusalem with its jaspers and emeralds; righteousness and peace and joy
are only the kingdom of God figuratively. The real sitting in heavenly
places is the sitting on thrones in a land of pure delight after we are
dead; serving the spirit of God is only sitting in heavenly places
figuratively. Science exactly reverses this process. For science, the
spiritual notion is the real one, the material notion is figurative. The
astonishing greatness of Paul is, that, coming when and where and whence
he did, he yet grasped the spiritual notion, if not exclusively and
fully, yet firmly and predominantly; more and more predominantly through
all the last years of his life. And what makes him original and himself,
is not what he shares with his contemporaries and with modern popular
religion, but this which he develops of his own; and this which he
develops of his own is just of a nature to make his religion a theology
instead of a theurgy, and at bottom a scientific instead of a
non-scientific structure. 'Die and come to life!' says Goethe,--an
unsuspected witness, assuredly, to the psychological and scientific
profoundness of Paul's conception of life and death:--'Die and come to
life! for, so long as this is not accomplished, thou art but a troubled
guest upon an earth of gloom.'[77]
[Footnote 77: Stirb und werde!
Denn so lang du das nicht hast,
Bist du nur ein trüber Gast
Auf der dunkeln Erde.]
The three cardinal points in Paul's theology are not therefore, we
repeat, those commonly assigned by Puritanism, _calling_,
_justification_, _sanctification_; but they are these: _dying with
Christ_, _resurrection from the dead_, _growing into Christ_. And we
will venture, moreover, to affirm that the more the Epistle to the
Romans is read and re-read with a clear mind, the more will the
conviction strengthen, that the sense indicated by the order in which we
here class the second main term of Paul's conception, is the essential
sense which Paul himself attaches to this term, in every single place
where in that Epistle he has used it. Not tradition and not theory, but
a simple impartial study of the development of Paul's central line of
thought, brings us to the conclusion, that from the very outset of the
Epistle, where Paul speaks of Christ as 'declared to be the son of God
with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the
dead,'[78] to the very end, the essential sense in which Paul uses the
term _resurrection_ is that of a rising, in this visible earthly
existence, from the death of obedience to blind selfish impulse, to the
life of obedience to the eternal moral order;--in Christ's case first,
as the pattern for us to follow; in the believer's case afterwards, as
following Christ's pattern through identifying himself with him.
[Footnote 78: _Rom._, i, 4.]