glimpse of the fundamental conceptions of Puritanism, which,
nevertheless, professes to have learnt its doctrine from St. Paul and
from his Epistle to the Romans. Once, for a moment, the term _faith_
brought us in contact with the doctrine of Puritanism, but only to see
that the essential sense given to this word by Paul Puritanism had
missed entirely. Other parts, then, of the Epistle to the Romans than
those by which we have been occupied must have chiefly fixed the
attention of Puritanism. And so it has in truth been. Yet the parts of
the Epistle to the Romans that have occupied us are undoubtedly the
parts which not our own theories and inclinations,--for we have
approached the matter without any,--but an impartial criticism of Paul's
real line of thought, must elevate as the most important. If a somewhat
pedantic form of expression may be forgiven for the sake of clearness,
we may say that of the eleven first chapters of the Epistle to the
Romans,--the chapters which convey Paul's theology, though not, as we
have seen, with any scholastic purpose or in any formal scientific mode
of exposition,--of these eleven chapters, the first, second, and third
are, in a scale of importance fixed by a scientific criticism of Paul's
line of thought, sub-primary; the fourth and fifth are secondary; the
sixth and eighth are primary; the seventh chapter is sub-primary; the
ninth, tenth, and eleventh chapters are secondary. Furthermore, to the
contents of the separate chapters themselves this scale must be carried
on, so far as to mark that of the two great primary chapters, the sixth
and the eighth, the eighth is primary down only to the end of the
twenty-eighth verse; from thence to the end it is, however eloquent, yet
for the purpose of a scientific criticism of Paul's essential theology,
only secondary.
The first chapter is to the Gentiles. Its purport is: You have not
righteousness. The second is to the Jews; and its purport is: No more
have you, though you think you have. The third chapter announces faith
in Christ as the one source of righteousness for all men. The fourth
chapter gives to the notion of righteousness through faith the sanction
of the Old Testament and of the history of Abraham. The fifth insists on
the causes for thankfulness and exultation in the boon of righteousness
through faith in Christ; and applies illustratively, with this design,
the history of Adam. The sixth chapter comes to the all-important
question: 'What _is_ that faith in Christ which I, Paul, mean?'--and
answers it. The seventh illustrates and explains the answer. But the
eighth, down to the end of the twenty-eighth verse, develops and
completes the answer. The rest of the eighth chapter expresses the sense
of safety and gratitude which the solution is fitted to inspire. The
ninth, tenth, and eleventh chapters uphold the second chapter's
thesis,--so hard to a Jew, so easy to us,--that righteousness is not by
the Jewish law; but dwell with hope and joy on a final result of things
which is to be favourable to Israel.
We shall be pardoned this somewhat formal analysis in consideration of
the clearness with which it enables us to survey the Puritan scheme of
original sin, predestination, and justification. The historical
transgression of Adam occupies, it will be observed, in Paul's ideas by
no means the primary, fundamental, all-important place which it holds in
the ideas of Puritanism. 'This' (the transgression of Adam) 'is our
original sin, the bitter root of all our actual transgressions in
thought, word, and deed.' Ah, no! Paul did not go to the Book of Genesis
to get the real testimony about sin. He went to experience for it. '_I
see_,' he says, 'a law in my members fighting against the law of my
mind, and bringing me into captivity.'[79] This is the essential
testimony respecting the rise of sin to Paul,--this rise of it in his
own heart and in the heart of all the men who hear him. At quite a later
stage in his conception of the religious life, in quite a subordinate
capacity, and for the mere purpose of illustration, comes in the
allusion to Adam and to what is called original sin. Paul's desire for
righteousness has carried him to Christ and to the conception of the
righteousness which is of God by faith, and he is expressing his
gratitude, delight, wonder, at the boon he has discovered. For the
purpose of exalting it he reverts to the well-known story of Adam. It
cannot even be said that Paul Judaises in his use here of this story; so
entirely does he subordinate it to his purpose of illustration, using it
just as he might have used it had he believed, which undoubtedly he did
not, that it was merely a symbolical legend, having the advantage of
being perfectly familiar to himself and his hearers. 'Think,' he says,
'how in Adam's fall one man's one transgression involved all men in
punishment; then estimate the blessedness of our boon in Christ, where
one man's one righteousness involves a world of transgressors in
blessing![80] This is not a scientific doctrine of corruption inherited
through Adam's fall; it is a rhetorical use of Adam's fall in a passing
allusion to it.
[Footnote 79: _Rom._, vii, 23.]
[Footnote 80: _Rom._, v, 12-21.]
We come to predestination. We have seen how strong was Paul's
consciousness of that power, not ourselves, in which we live and move
and have our being. The sense of life, peace, and joy, which comes
through identification with Christ, brings with it a deep and grateful
consciousness that this sense is none of our own getting and making. No,
it is grace, it is the free gift of God, who gives abundantly beyond all
that we ask or think, and calls things that are not as though they were.
'It is not of him that willeth or of him that runneth, but of God that
showeth mercy.'[81] As moral agents, for whom alone exist all the
predicaments of merit and demerit, praise and blame, effort and failure,
vice and virtue, we are impotent and lost;--we are saved through that in
us which is passive and involuntary; we are saved through our
affections, it is as beings _acted upon_ and _influenced_ that we are
saved! Well might Paul cry out, as this mystical but profound and
beneficent conception filled his soul: 'All things work together for
good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his
purpose.'[82] Well might he say, in the gratitude which cannot find
words enough to express its sense of boundless favour, that those who
reached peace with God through identification with Christ were vessels
of mercy, marked from endless ages; that they had been foreknown,
predestinated, called, justified, glorified.
[Footnote 81: _Rom._, ix, 16.]
[Footnote 82: _Rom._, viii, 28.]
It may be regretted, for the sake of the clear understanding of his
essential doctrine, that Paul did not stop here. It might seem as if the
word 'prothesis,' _purpose_, lured him on into speculative mazes, and
involved him, at last, in an embarrassment, from which he impatiently
tore himself by the harsh and unedifying image of the clay and the
potter. But this is not so. These allurements of speculation, which have
been fatal to so many of his interpreters, never mastered Paul. He was
led into difficulty by the tendency which we have already noticed as
making his real imperfection both as a thinker and as a writer,--the
tendency to Judaise.
Already, in the fourth chapter, this tendency had led him to seem to
rest his doctrine of justification by faith upon the case of Abraham,
whereas, in truth, it needs all the good will in the world, and some
effort of ingenuity, even to bring the case of Abraham within the
operation of this doctrine. That righteousness is life, that all men by
themselves fail of righteousness, that only through identification with
Jesus Christ can they reach it,--these propositions, for us at any rate,
prove themselves much better than they are proved by the thesis that
Abraham in old age believed God's promise that his seed should yet be as
the stars for multitude, and that this was counted to him for
righteousness. The sanction thus apparently given to the idea that faith
is a mere belief, or opinion of the mind, has put thousands of Paul's
readers on a false track.
But Paul's Judaising did not end here. To establish his doctrine of
righteousness by faith, he had to eradicate the notion that his people
were specially privileged, and that, having the Mosaic law, they did not
need anything farther. For us, this one verse of the tenth chapter:
_There is no difference between Jew and Greek, for it is the same Lord
of all, who is rich to all that call upon him_,--and these four words of
another verse: _For righteousness, heart-faith necessary!_--effect far
more for Paul's object than his three chapters bristling with Old
Testament quotations. By quotation, however, he was to proceed, in order
to invest his doctrine with the talismanic virtues of a verbal sanction
from the law and the prophets. He shows, therefore, that the law and the
prophets had said that only a remnant, an _elect remnant_, of Israel
should be saved, and that the rest should be blinded. But to say that
peace with God through Jesus Christ inspires such an abounding sense of
gratitude, and of its not being our work, that we can only speak of
ourselves as _called_ and _chosen_ to it, is one thing; in so speaking,
we are on the ground of personal experience. To say, on the other hand,
that God has blinded and reprobated other men, so that they shall not
reach this blessing, is to quit the ground of personal experience, and
to begin employing the magnified and non-natural man in the next street.
We then require, in order to account for his proceedings, such an
analogy as that of the clay and the potter.
This is Calvinism, and St. Paul undoubtedly falls into it. But the
important thing to remark is, that this Calvinism, which with the
Calvinist is primary, is with Paul secondary, or even less than
secondary. What with Calvinists is their fundamental idea, the centre of
their theology, is for Paul an idea added to his central ideas, and
extraneous to them; brought in incidentally, and due to the necessities
of a bad mode of recommending and enforcing his thesis. It is as if
Newton had introduced into his exposition of the law of gravitation an
incidental remark, perhaps erroneous, about light or colours; and we
were then to make this remark the head and front of Newton's law. The
theological idea of reprobation was an idea of Jewish theology as of
ours, an idea familiar to Paul and a part of his training, an idea which
probably he never consciously abandoned. But its complete secondariness
in him is clearly established by other considerations than those which
we have drawn from the place and manner of his introduction of it. The
very phrase about the clay and the potter is not Paul's own; he does but
repeat a stock theological figure. Isaiah had said: 'O Lord, we are the
clay, and thou our potter, and we are all the work of thy hand.'[83]
Jeremiah had said, in the Lord's name, to Israel: 'Behold, as the clay
in the potter's hand, so are ye in mine hand, O house of Israel.'[84]
And the son of Sirach comes yet nearer to Paul's very words: 'As the
clay is in the potter's hand to fashion it at his pleasure, so man is in
the hand of him that made him, to render to them as liketh him
best.'[85] Is an original man's essential, characteristic idea, that
which he adopts thus bodily from some one else? But take Paul's truly
essential idea. 'We are buried with Christ through baptism into death,
that like as he was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father,
even so we also shall walk in newness of life.'[86] Did Jeremiah say
that? Is any one the author of it except Paul? Then there should
Calvinism have looked for Paul's secret, and not in the commonplace
about the potter and the vessels of wrath. A commonplace which is so
entirely a commonplace to him, that he contradicts it even while he is
Judaising; for in the very batch of chapters we are discussing he says:
'Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.'[87]
Still more clear is, on this point, his real mind, when he is not
Judaising: 'God is the saviour of all men, specially of those that
believe.'[88] And anything, finally, which might seem dangerous in the
grateful sense of a calling, choosing, and leading by eternal
goodness,--a notion as natural as the Calvinistic doctrine of
predestination is monstrous,--Paul abundantly supplies in more than one
striking passage; as, for instance, in that incomparable third chapter
of the Philippians (from which, and from the sixth and eighth chapters
of the Romans, Paul's whole theology, if all his other writings were
lost, might be reconstructed), where he expresses his humble
consciousness that the mystical resurrection which is his aim, glory,
and salvation, he does not yet, and cannot, completely attain.
[Footnote 83: _Is._, lxiv, 8.]
[Footnote 84: _Jer._, xviii, 6.]
[Footnote 85: _Ecclesiasticus_, xxxiii, 13.]
[Footnote 86: _Rom._, vi, 4.]
[Footnote 87: _Rom._, x, 13.]
[Footnote 88: I _Tim._, iv, 10.]
The grand doctrine, then, which Calvinistic Puritanism has gathered from
Paul, turns out to be a secondary notion of his, which he himself, too,
has contradicted or corrected. But, at any rate, 'Christ meritoriously
obtained eternal redemption for us.' 'If there be anything,' the
quarterly organ of Puritanism has lately told us in its hundredth
number, 'that human experience has made certain, it is that man can
never outgrow his necessity for the great truths and provisions of the
Incarnation and the sacrificial Atonement of the Divine Son of God.'
God, his justice being satisfied by Christ's bearing according to
compact our guilt and dying in our stead, is appeased and set free to
exercise towards us his mercy, and to justify and sanctify us in
consideration of Christ's righteousness imputed to us, if we give our
hearty belief and consent to the satisfaction thus made. This hearty
belief being given, 'we rest,' to use the consecrated expression already
quoted, 'in the finished work of a Saviour.' This doctrine of imputed
righteousness is now, as predestination formerly was, the favourite
thesis of popular Protestant theology. And, like the doctrine of
predestination, it professes to be specially derived from St. Paul.
But whoever has followed attentively the main line of St. Paul's
theology, as we have tried to show it, will see at once that in St.
Paul's essential ideas this popular notion of a substitution, and
appeasement, and imputation of alien merit, has no place. Paul knows
nothing of a sacrificial atonement; what Paul knows of is a reconciling
sacrifice. The true substitution, for Paul, is not the substitution of
Jesus Christ in men's stead as victim on the cross to God's offended
justice; it is the substitution by which the believer, in his own
person, repeats Jesus Christ's dying to sin. Paul says, in real truth,
to our Puritans with their magical and mechanical salvation, just what
he said to the men of circumcision: 'If I preach resting in the finished
work of a Saviour, _why am I yet persecuted? why do I die daily? then is
the stumbling-block of the cross annulled._'[89] That hard, that
well-nigh impossible doctrine, that our whole course must be a
crucifixion and a resurrection, even as Christ's whole course was a
crucifixion and a resurrection, becomes superfluous. Yet this is my
central doctrine.'
[Footnote 89: _Gal._, v, 2.]
The notion of God as a magnified and non-natural man, appeased by a
sacrifice and remitting in consideration of it his wrath against those
who had offended him,--this notion of God, which science repels, was
equally repelled, in spite of all that his nation, time, and training
had in them to favour it, by the profound religious sense of Paul. In
none of his epistles is the reconciling work of Christ really presented
under this aspect. One great epistle there is, however, which does
apparently present it under this aspect,--the Epistle to the Hebrews.
Paul's phraseology, and even the central idea which he conveys in that
phraseology, were evidently well known to the writer of the Epistle to
the Hebrews. Nay, if we merely sought to prove a thesis, rather than to
ascertain the real bearing of the documents we canvass, we should have
no difficulty in making it appear, by texts taken from the Epistle to
the Hebrews, that the doctrine of this epistle, no less than the
doctrine of the Epistle to the Romans, differs entirely from the common
doctrine of Puritanism. This, however, we shall by no means do; because
it is our honest opinion that the popular doctrine of 'the sacrificial
Atonement of the Divine Son of God' derives, if not a real, yet at any
rate a strong apparent sanction from the Epistle to the Hebrews. Even
supposing, what is probably true, that the popular doctrine is really
the doctrine neither of the one epistle nor of the other, yet it must be
confessed that while it is the reader's fault,--a fault due to his fixed
prepossessions, and to his own want of penetration,--if he gets the
popular doctrine out of the Epistle to the Romans, it is on the other
hand the writer's fault and no longer the reader's, if out of the
Epistle to the Hebrews he gets the popular doctrine. For the author of
that epistle is, if not subjugated, yet at least preponderantly occupied
by the idea of the Jewish system of sacrifices, and of the analogies to
Christ's sacrifice which are furnished by that system.
If other proof were wanting, this alone would make it impossible that
the Epistle to the Hebrews should be Paul's; and indeed of all the
epistles which bear his name, it is the only one which we may not,
perhaps, in spite of the hesitation caused by grave difficulties, be
finally content to leave in considerable part to him.[90] Luther's
conjecture, which ascribes to Apollos the Epistle to the Hebrews,
derives corroboration from the one account of Apollos which we have;
that 'he was an eloquent man and mighty in the Scriptures.' The Epistle
to the Hebrews is just such a performance as might naturally have come
from an eloquent man and mighty in the Scriptures; in whom the
intelligence, and the powers of combining, type-finding, and expounding,
somewhat dominated the religious perceptions. The Epistle to the Hebrews
is full of beauty and power; and what may be called the exterior conduct
of its argument is as able and satisfying as Paul's exterior conduct of
his argument is generally embarrassed. Its details are full of what is
edifying; but its apparent central conception of Christ's death, as a
perfect sacrifice which consummated the imperfect sacrifices of the
Jewish law, is a mere notion of the understanding, and is not a
religious idea. Turn it which way we will, the notion of appeasement of
an offended God by vicarious sacrifice, which the Epistle to the Hebrews
apparently sanctions, will never truly speak to the religious sense, or
bear fruit for true religion. It is no blame to Apollos if he was
somewhat overpowered by this notion, for the whole world was full of it,
up to his time, in his time, and since his time; and it has driven
theologians before it like sheep. The wonder is, not that Apollos should
have adopted it, but that Paul should have been enabled, through the
incomparable power and energy of religious perception informing his
intellectual perception, in reality to put it aside. Figures drawn from
the dominant notion of sacrificial appeasement he used, for the notion
has so saturated the imagination and language of humanity that its
figures pass naturally and irresistibly into all our speech. Popular
Puritanism consists of the apparent doctrine from the Epistle to the
Hebrews, set forth with Paul's figures. But the doctrine itself Paul had
really put aside, and had substituted for it a better.
[Footnote 90: Considerations drawn from date, place, the use of
single words, the development of a church organisation, the
development of an ascetic system, are not enough to make us wholly
take away certain epistles from St. Paul. The only decisive
evidence, for this purpose, is that internal evidence furnished by
the whole body of the thoughts and style of an epistle; and this
evidence that Paul was not its author the Epistle to the Hebrews
furnishes. From the like evidence, the Apocalypse is clearly shown
to be not by the author of the fourth Gospel. This clear evidence
against the tradition which assigns them to St. Paul, the Epistles
to Timothy and Titus do not offer. The serious ground of difficulty
as to these epistles will to the genuine critic be, that much in
them fails to produce that peculiarly _searching_ effect on the
reader, which it is in general characteristic of Paul's own real
work to exercise. But they abound with Pauline things, and are, in
any case, written by an excellent man, and in an excellent and large
spirit.]
The term _sacrifice_, in men's natural use of it, contains three
notions: the notion of winning the favour or buying off the wrath of a
powerful being by giving him something precious; the notion of parting
with something naturally precious; and the notion of expiation, not now
in the sense of buying off wrath or satisfying a claim, but of suffering
in that wherein we have sinned. The first notion is, at bottom, merely
superstitious, and belongs to the ignorant and fear-ridden childhood of
humanity; it is the main element, however, in the Puritan conception of
justification. The second notion explains itself; it is the main element
in the Pauline conception of justification. Jesus parted with what, to
men in general, is the most precious of things,--individual self and
selfishness; he pleased not himself, obeyed the spirit of God, died to
sin and to the law in our members, consummated upon the cross this
death; here is Paul's essential notion of Christ's sacrifice.
The third notion may easily be misdealt with, but it has a profound
truth; in Paul's conception of justification there is much of it. In
some way or other, he who would 'cease from sin' must nearly always
'suffer in the flesh.' It is found to be true, that 'without shedding of
blood is no remission.' 'If you can be good with pleasure,' says Bishop
Wilson with his genius of practical religious sense, 'God does not envy
you your joy; but such is our corruption, that every man cannot be so.'
The substantial basis of the notion of expiation, so far as we ourselves
are concerned, is the bitter experience that the habit of wrong, of
blindly obeying selfish impulse, so affects our temper and powers, that
to withstand selfish impulse, to do right, when the sense of right
awakens in us, requires an effort out of all proportion to the actual
present emergency. We have not only the difficulty of the present act in
itself, we have the resistance of all our past; fire and the knife,
cautery and amputation, are often necessary in order to induce a vital
action, which, if it were not for our corrupting past, we might have
obtained from the natural healthful vigour of our moral organs. This is
the real basis of our personal sense of the need of expiating, and thus
it is that man expiates.