Part 7

It is evident that some difficulty arises out of Paul's adding to the general sense of the word faith,--_a holding fast to an unseen power of goodness_,--a particular sense of his own,--_identification with Christ_. It will at once appear that this faith of Paul's is in truth a specific form of holding fast to an unseen power of goodness; and that while it can properly be said of Abraham, for instance, that he was justified by faith, if we take faith in its plain sense of holding fast to an unseen power of goodness, yet it cannot without difficulty and recourse to a strained figure be said of him, if we take faith in Paul's specific sense of identification with Christ. Paul however, undoubtedly, having conveyed his new specific sense into the word faith, still uses the word in all cases where, without this specific sense, it was before applicable and usual; and in this way he often creates ambiguity. Why, it may be asked, does Paul, instead of employing a special term to denote his special meaning, still thus employ the general term faith? We are inclined to think it was from that desire to get for his words and thoughts not only the real but also the apparent sanction and consecration of the Hebrew Scriptures, which we have called his tendency to Judaise. It was written of the founder of Israel, Abraham, that he _believed_ God and it was counted to him for righteousness. The prophet Habakkuk had the famous text: 'The just shall live by _faith_.'[59] Jesus, too, had used and sanctioned the use of the word _faith_ to signify cleaving to the unseen God's power of goodness as shown in Christ.[60] Peter and John and the other apostles habitually used the word in the same sense, with the modification introduced by Christ's departure. This was enough to make Paul retain for that vital operation, which was the heart of his whole religious system, the name of faith, though he had considerably developed and enlarged the name's usual meaning. Fraught with this new and developed sense, the term does not always quite well suit the cases to which it was in its old sense, with perfect propriety, applied; this, however, Paul did not regard. The term applied with undeniable truth, though not with perfect adequacy, to the great spiritual operation whereto he affixed it; and it was at the same time the name given to the crowning grace of the great father of the Jewish nation, Abraham; it was the prophet Habakkuk's talismanic and consecrated term, _faith_.

[Footnote 59: _Gen._, xv, 6; _Habakkuk_, ii, 4.]

[Footnote 60: _Mark_, xi, 22.]

In this word _faith_, as used by St. Paul,[61] we reach a point round which the ceaseless stream of religious exposition and discussion has for ages circled. Even for those who misconceive Paul's line of ideas most completely, faith is so evidently the central point in his system that their thoughts cannot but centre upon it. Puritanism, as is well known, has talked of little else but faith. And the word is of such a nature, that, the true clue once lost which Paul has given us to its meaning, every man may put into it almost anything he likes, all the fancies of his superstition or of his fanaticism. To say, therefore, that to have faith in Christ means to be attached to Christ, to embrace Christ, to be identified with Christ, is not enough; the question is, to be attached to him _how_, to embrace him _how_?

[Footnote 61: With secondary uses of the word, such as its use with the article, '_the_ faith,' in expressions like 'the words of the faith,' to signify the body of tenets and principles received by believers from the apostle, we need not here concern ourselves. They present no difficulty.]

A favourite expression of popular theology conveys perfectly the popular definition of faith: _to rest in the finished work of the Saviour_. In the scientific language of Protestant theology, to embrace Christ, to have saving faith, is 'to give our consent heartily to the covenant of grace, and so to receive the benefit of justification, whereby God pardons all our sins and accepts us as righteous for the righteousness of Christ imputed to us.' This is mere theurgy, in which, so far as we have yet gone, we have not found Paul dealing. Wesley, with his genius for godliness, struggled all his life for some deeper and more edifying account of that faith, which he felt working wonders in his own soul, than that it was a hearty consent to the covenant of grace and an acceptance of the benefit of Christ's imputed righteousness. Yet this amiable and gracious spirit, but intellectually slight and shallow compared to Paul, beat his wings in vain. Paul, nevertheless, had solved the problem for him, if only he could have had eyes to see Paul's solution.

'He that believes in Christ,' says Wesley, 'discerns spiritual things: 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.]