Paul Wernle · 20 of 30

Chapter XV> The Pauline Soteriology. · Part 1

ST PAUL understood the word ‘salvation’ in a very wide and comprehensive sense—not merely as liberation from evil or from sin, but as salvation out of this present evil world into the good world which in a sense is future but has now already begun. Hence the simplest division of our subject will be:—This present evil world and its powers; the crisis; Jesus the Saviour; the salvation of believers.

This Present Evil World and its Powers.

In his missionary preaching St Paul began with the message of the judgment that is to come. Under the lurid light of the day of judgment he revealed the entire destruction of his hearers. The theoretical basis of this preaching is a radically pessimistic view of the whole world, which takes no account of the difference between Jew and Gentile, a pessimism which extends to the whole human race, and even beyond it to nature and the supersensuous world itself.

In the first place, the whole human race, the whole of creation, is doomed to death. Since Adam, death has seized upon the sovereignty and reigns supreme. It has found its way everywhere. There are no exceptions. That is not a matter of course, it is unnatural. Man’s will is to live. Hence he feels his mortality as a hard slavery which causes him to sigh in deepest melancholy.

Whence comes this doom of death, mysterious and yet certain?

The Jew Paul answers, from sin. The wages of sin is death. Since Adam’s sin death goes in and out amongst men like a hereditary disease; but at the same time it is the consequence of the sin of each individual. For all men have sinned and therefore all die. The universality of sin follows as a simple inference from the universality of death. St Paul is here thinking, in the first place, of individuals. They are free agents—freely have they sinned and so incurred the penalty of death. Thus far St Paul has not diverged from the teaching of the Rabbis. But he soon leaves that teaching behind him when he declares that it is not in the power of the individual’s free will to accept or to reject sin. Sin has acquired a sovereign power over the human race since Adam. There is a kingdom of sin, and that is humanity itself. We all, Jews and Gentiles, are under sin. There is a law of sin in our members to which we are subject. Hereby St Paul declares the necessity of sin for all men, and not merely its actual universality. He gives expression to this thought of the necessity of sin in opposition to the rabbinical doctrine, led thereto perhaps by a deeper insight into the innermost life of the soul and the play of motives, still more perhaps by his apologetic. For this thought is a necessary postulate for the doctrine of salvation through Christ, which might appear to be superfluous as long as merely the universality of sin were maintained and exceptions were conceivable.

But what is the origin of sin, with its all-compelling power?

St Paul gives two answers to this question, the difference between which is not explained in his letters.

1. The whole of mankind is involved in the fall of the first man. Through the first man, Adam, came sin, and as its consequence death, unto all men. That is the Jewish theory built up by the Rabbis on the foundation of Gen. iii. Its greatness consists in the fact that it is an attempt to give expression to the thought of the solidarity of the whole human race. The first man is made to appear before God as the representative of the whole race, and his fall is therefore accounted as the fall of the race. But the juridical and, as it were, historical form of this theory is unsatisfactory. Sin enters from without by chance, without any inner necessity, and obtains sovereign power by the commission of one single and accidental fault. And this fault of the single individual has then to be placed by the supreme judge to the debit account of all his descendants, as though each one of them had committed it himself. Such a juridical appreciation of facts harmonizes with Jewish modes of thought, but with no deeper sentiment. It was more for the sake of antithesis, too, that St Paul made use of this theory. He wished by means of it to establish clearly the universal significance of Christ.

2. Sin clings to man’s bodily nature. All men are flesh, and sin dwells in the flesh. Man is sold under sin because he is flesh. Nothing good dwells in him, that is, in his flesh. So closely are the body and sin connected that St Paul creates the expression “body of sin.” This theory is neither Jewish nor Greek, but an original creation of the apostle’s. The Jewish starting-point is, it is true, clear enough: the opinion that the human body is weak, impotent and corruptible, keeping men in entire separation from God. Jewish, too, is the opposition between flesh and spirit, instead of between body and soul, as the Greeks say. But the pessimism which we read in St Paul’s sentences is by no means Jewish. The conviction of the weakness of the flesh and of the existence of evil motives or of the evil heart in man never suffered the Jews to abandon their confidence in their own strength and righteousness. Side by side with the feeling of sinfulness, the most characteristic features of Jewish piety are self-satisfaction and boasting on account of good works. Words such as “I know that in me, i.e., in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing” must have had an altogether repulsive sound for Jewish ears; and Paul is very well aware how he tramples the optimism and self-satisfaction of his fellow-countrymen under foot when he uses them. And when he goes so far as to say “The flesh lusteth against the spirit,” he appears to take the flesh as the principle of sin and sensuality, just as matter is the seat of evil for the Greeks. Here he is ranging himself on the side of the dualism of the later philosophy which is ultimately derived from Plato. He draws nearer to the Greeks, just as Philo did before. But for all that St Paul does not turn into a Greek. There is an effective barrier to this conversion—the firm hold which he has, as a Jew, of the belief in the creation, which surfers no second principle to exist by the side of God, but derives the flesh as well as everything else from the Creator of the universe. There is besides this a second barrier: his belief as a Christian that the world and all that is in it—the flesh therefore included—belong to God and those that are His, and that it is just the flesh in which the Spirit is predestined to lodge. Sin does not originate in the flesh—it takes up its abode therein as a visitor from outside, just as the Spirit is likewise to come in from without and dwell therein. It is evident, therefore, that this theory of St Paul’s upon which he bases the necessity of sin is his own work. Hard personal struggles and sad experience of the power of the senses may very well have supported the theory. The decisive factor was the destruction of all his self-confidence, of all trust in his own natural powers through faith in Jesus the Redeemer. Complete pessimism as regards the body is the necessary converse of the optimistic trust in Christ and His Spirit.

Did St Paul himself reconcile his two theories of the origin of sin? Not in his letters—e.g. in 1 Cor. xv. death is derived from Adam’s fall and after wards from Adam’s earthly nature, without any attempt at reconciling the two statements. And the same applies therefore to sin. But can we rest content with this conclusion? Surely we must choose between the two. The connection between flesh and sin is either antecedent or subsequent to the fall. In the first case it is cause; in the latter, effect.

Here we stand face to face with the ultimate questions of theological speculation. The gnostics soon afterwards occupied themselves with these matters. In fact, we here enter upon the domain of the Pauline gnosis and leave the field of thought covered by his missionary preaching. St Paul did not shirk these ultimate questions, but he came to no satisfactory conclusion, and contented himself with answers which are contradictory.

One can distinguish the germs of three theories.

1. The theory of evolution.—This present earthly world is related to the future spiritual world as the lower stage to the higher. First the natural (psychical), then the spiritual (pneumatic), first Adam, that is, of the earth, then He that is of heaven—Christ. St Paul develops this theory in 1 Cor. xv. for a definite purpose. He wants to make it perfectly plain to his Greek converts that the resurrection body will not suffer from the defects of the present body. Hence he contrasts it as the higher and the perfect with the lower and the imperfect. In so doing he adopts the story of the creation of man in Gen. ii., and thus obtains a theory which can easily be reconciled with the belief in the divine creation. It is full of a magnificent optimism. Onwards and upwards, step by step, leads the road. When the thought of the education of the human race obtained a footing in the Church towards the end of the second century, then men were glad to invoke the authority of St Paul. But as sin and the flesh are outside of St Paul’s scope altogether in these passages in First Corinthians, they can be of no real importance for the ultimate questions.

2. The theory of degeneration.—Not only man but all nature is fallen from a state of glory into a state of corruption. The foundation is the story of the fall in Gen. iii. combined with the opposition between the spirit (before the fall) and the flesh (after the fall). Jewish legends (the books of Adam) and gnostic and Catholic theologians anticipate and continue this line of thought. In Paul himself we only find a few scattered indications, which all, however, converge in this direction. The present evil world cannot as such be ascribed to God. God created it, and it was very good. Did not God, according to the Bible story, create the world and mankind in glory as a world of free spirits? Adam and the whole cosmos were confined within the bounds of matter (σάῥξ) as a punishment for the fall. True, the flesh was created by God, but only as a means of chastisement, and that was death which according to Gen. ii. 17 was to follow on the very day of man’s disobedience (cf. Rom. vii. 11: “Sin . . . slew me”). That, again, was nakedness (2 Cor. v. 4), of which man became conscious immediately after the fall: he had lost his former tabernacle, the body of his glory. It was the coming short of the glory of God (Rom. iii. 23), that is, of that body of glory created in God’s image with which man had been clothed in Paradise. Mortality is the punishment for the fall from the world of spirits through the disobedience of the first man, and the groaning and travailing of the whole creation betokens the longing for the lost Paradise. It is only this theory that harmonizes with every step of St Paul’s argument and completely explains his position with regard to the flesh which is God’s creation and yet was not from the very first. But these subjects did not enter into his preaching to his new Gentile converts. And thus we can readily understand that this theory is only incidentally mentioned in his letters.

3. The theory of evil spirits. St Paul once mentions incidentally (2 Cor. xi. 5) that the serpent beguiled Eve—according to the Jewish tradition it was to commit adultery. This passage implies that the devil should be regarded as the cause of the whole of the evil condition of the world; nor is the absence of all mention of Satan in the chief passages in the Epistle to the Romans any argument to the contrary, for the place of Satan is there taken by a kind of mythological figure, an abstraction, sin. St Paul’s thoughts always cross over to the spirit-world ultimately; proof of this can be found in other Epistles besides those to the Colossians and Ephesians. Even in the Epistles to the Romans and in First Corinthians we read of principalities, authorities and powers in the upper regions which would separate us from God, and which must be abolished as God’s enemies before the end of the world. Now, as everything proceeds from God, and therefore likewise the angels, there must have been a rebellion in the spirit world and a falling away of some. On one occasion—it is in the passage relating to the head-dress of women during divine service—he alludes to the fall of the angels mentioned in Gen. vi. when the sons of God sought the daughters of men in marriage. On another, when speaking of the lawsuits of Christians with each other, he reminds the Corinthians that they, the saints, shall some day sit in judgment over the angels. All this presupposes apocryphal Jewish traditions as to the occurrences in the spirit world. Thus the fall has extended even to the world above, and so the picture of the present evil world is completed. All demons are of course counted amongst these fallen spirits, and as the whole of the heathen world—its religion and its immorality—is ascribed to their agency, this gnostic theory obtains an immediate practical significance. Satan is the God of this world—i.e., of the kingdom of sin—which is manifested, especially amongst the heathen, in so lurid a light.

St Paul’s pessimism culminates in this last sentence concerning the God of this world. The view at which he finally arrives is that this present evil world was not originally so created by God, but has only become such through the fall, and that it is now governed by fallen angels, powers hostile to God. Various reasons led the apostle to form this awful opinion: contemporary Jewish thought and feeling, his own bitter experience, his realization of the darkness of the heathen world in which he worked, and of the lurid light cast by the approaching day of judgment. The apocalypse of Ezra shows us how strong a tendency the Jews had in times of national disaster to entertain such pessimistic views of the world’s future. And yet, what a difference there is! For Ezra, there are still some righteous, few though they be in number, whereas St Paul writes, “None is righteous; no, not one,” and “in me dwelleth no good thing.” The reason for this difference is evident. St Paul’s pessimism is intended to serve his apologetic. It is because Jesus alone is the Redeemer, that the world has to be presented as irredeemably wicked, and every other road to salvation closed to men. It is not the actual recognition of the greatness of sin and the impotence of man which is at the root of this theory, but faith in Christ necessitates these pessimistic postulates as presuppositions. There is a convincing proof of this statement. The pessimistic view of the world no longer holds good for the Christian, or at any rate only in a modified form. The Christian lives in God’s world, and he is lord thereof. The theory of sin is an apologetic means for the awakening of faith; when once this end has been attained, it gives way to other conceptions.

It is evident that the apostle’s apologetic is very far removed from the preaching of Jesus. Jesus was no pessimist, and yet He surely knew what was in man, and knew that no one was good. Children and birds and flowers were His delight. He rejoiced in God’s love and in the good men whom He met. St Paul first violently extinguished every other light in the world so that Jesus might then shine in it alone. This exaggeration of the truth in the service of apologetics was the more fatal that the Church soon began to turn this pessimism to good account.

The Crisis. Jesus the Saviour.

In the scheme of St Paul’s missionary preaching the message of the judgment and of death is followed by that of the crucified and risen Son of God. Here we have the heart and centre of the Pauline theology. Here we can see more clearly than in many other cases into the genesis of his creed. It goes right back to the deep personal experience connected with the vision of the risen Christ. And this experience imparts its personal character to the theory, producing an impression of strength and truth. But the necessity arises for presenting it in an apologetic form—it is recast from a theological point of view, and it is only now that it assumes the outer form with which we are familiar.

What did Paul learn of Jesus? For what was he indebted to Him?

He did not know Jesus upon earth, and only learnt some facts of His life by hearsay. His personal acquaintance with Jesus was only brought about by means of the vision on the road to Damascus. Here he saw the heavenly Jesus, the risen Lord, the Spirit, and was called by Him to be an apostle. Hence the Resurrection of Jesus comes to be a fact of very far-reaching influence for him. Death’s reign is at an end. Eternity—the spirit world—enters in triumph into the world of sense. The morrow of the new day has dawned. Now, as the call at Damascus is the starting-point for the whole of St Paul’s new life, the resurrection has really become the foundation of his religion for him.

A new light is forthwith shed upon the crucifixion likewise. Before this the Cross was the greatest stumbling-block, as it apparently refuted the claim of Jesus to be the Messiah. But no sooner was He accepted as the risen Lord than it came to appear as something divine. It was the means of salvation. By the sacrifice on the Cross God’s message of love and grace was conveyed to man. These seem to us to be theological reflections. But the sense of pardon and blessedness which Paul derived from the Cross was a real personal experience. Henceforth it is for him the fixed centre round which all history turns, the source of all comfort, of all peace with God. St Paul sees the motto “God for us” written in great letters over the Cross.

There can be no doubt, therefore, that this experience is the root of St Paul’s Christology. The articles of his creed, however, are a great deal more than the expression of this experience. In them as they have now come down to us we can hear the Christian apologist speaking. One instance above all others will serve to make this point clear. As the result of his experience St Paul might have said: “As for me, it was at the foot of the cross that I first learnt what God’s love meant.” But instead of this we read in the letters: “No man can attain to the certainty of this atonement save in the cross alone.” That is the language of the apologist. Hence the extension to all men, the proof of necessity, the exclusion of all other possibilities. This applies to al] St Paul’s statements about the crucifixion and resurrection: how much more to the development of the doctrine concerning the Son of God, where there is no personal experience to build upon.

The Cross, the Resurrection, the Son of God—these are three new great starting-points in the Pauline Christology. In the Cross he proclaims God’s love, in the Resurrection the dawn of the world that is to come, in the Son of God the pattern for all Christians. Since St Paul wrote, these are the three subjects of all Christology.

The Proof of the Love of God.

The first portion of St Paul’s apologetic had presented the Gentiles before the judgment-seat of God in all their sin and moral degradation. The wrath of God was all that they could expect. There was no means of escaping from this wrath by their own power or by sacrifices of their own. And then, when they were thus distressed and despairing, he brings them this surprising proof of God’s love. Even before St Paul, the death of Jesus had become the object of theological thought. This had been caused, above all, by the controversy with the Jews. As the Jews interpreted the death of Jesus as a divine punishment, the Christians opposed them with an explanation of that death by which the innocence of Jesus was securely established. His death was, it is true, a punishment—thus far they acknowledged their opponents to be in the right—but not for His own sin, but for the guilt of the Jewish people. It came to be a definite article of the Christian creed that Jesus died for the sins of those that repent and set their hopes upon His death.

When once Paul became a Christian, he accepted this explanation. All that he did was to add additional conceptions of sacrifice, propitiation and redemption, employing the terms of the professional theologians. The theory of sacrifice is repeated in countless variations in his letters, now in a legal, now in a ceremonial form, and again in both together. It was really through St Paul that the thought of Jesus’ death, of sin, and of the atonement for sin, first came to be inseparably connected. St Paul’s greatness is not, however, constituted by this rationalism—for such we must term the arithmetical manipulation of the death of Jesus—but by an entirely new appreciation of the Crucifixion.

In the first place, he removed the death of Jesus from its narrow Jewish setting and placed it in the centre of the world’s history. He attached so immense a significance to this propitiatory sacrifice that all petty legal categories were felt to be comparatively unimportant. Jesus did not die for the sins of a few Jews alone, but for all mankind; nay, more, even for the world of spirits. The explanation of this fact is that no ordinary righteous man died on the Cross, but the Son of God, the highest object of the divine love. What need after this for any other sacrifices, means of propitiation, acts of penitence—in fact, of any human works? The propitiatory death of Jesus occupies the place of all that was ever done to gain God’s grace. There was nothing left to be done by men, or even by angels, than just to accept this propitiatory sacrifice. But in the next place St Paul’s interpretation of this sacrifice started from above and not from below. It is not that a sacrifice is to be brought to God which is to change His wrath into mercy. Such had been men’s thoughts before, but God is the agent, the sacrificer, the propitiator: and the motive of His action is love, and nothing but love. That was an entire reversal of the usual point of view, and we find it clearly and consciously employed by St Paul in all the chief passages of his letters: God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself. God gave His own Son for us, to show us that He would give us all. God shows His love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us. By thus proclaiming aloud the love of God the apostle really does away with the necessity for all legal and propitiatory thoughts. If the conception of sacrifice still remains, it is transformed into a mere symbol. It is not God who loves us that needs the sacrifice, but we men need the certainty that the act of propitiation has taken place. At bottom, the death on the Cross is not a means of propitiating God, but a symbol of His grace for men.

It is true, however, that the influence of Jewish modes of thought again makes itself felt here in the exaggerated estimate of the single historical fact. As before the whole process of man’s moral degradation was derived from Adam’s fall, accompanied by sin and death, so now all God’s grace is gathered together from the whole course of history, and concentrated in the death of Jesus. Paul actually denies that God ever pardoned before the death of Jesus; at any rate, he maintains that it was only now that His grace was made manifest. Had he not in his apologetic zeal already extinguished every other light in the world? This new light must now therefore illuminate the whole world and the whole course of history both forwards and backwards. This exaltation of the one historical fact was not so dangerous for Paul, who expected the end of the world in the near future, as for later ages, which were thereby nothing less than robbed of their faith in the living God. It must, moreover, be remembered that the historical fact can never be intelligible without the theological interpretation. One of two results is bound to follow. Either rationalism gains the upper hand, and defines the necessity of the death of Jesus, attaching a legal or ceremonial value thereto; or the paradoxical and the miraculous elements prevail, and then there remains nothing but faith in the unintelligible mystery. Both results can be traced in St Paul’s writings. The same man boasts of the folly of the Cross, and defines the ways of the wisdom of God.

Here the old and the new lie side by side. To the former belong the theory of sacrifice and the rationalism, which attains to its position of influence in the Church through none other than Paul himself, to the latter the paradox that God’s love is manifested in the Cross. Now this statement, when properly understood, annuls the theory of sacrifice, and approximates to the thought of Jesus that even death and suffering come out of God’s hand. But when St Paul narrows the statement, maintaining that God’s grace is visible only in the Cross, then he departs from Jesus’ teaching, who saw God’s love poured out upon mankind in all that He gave them both in trouble and in joy.

The reason of this is that St Paul, as an apologist, is obliged to narrow the road that leads to God’s love, so that it must perforce pass through the Christian faith alone, and therein he sets no good example to the Church.

The Dawn of the Coming World.

The Resurrection of Jesus was an unparalleled event; the sovereignty of death was at an end; he that had ears could hear the first peal sounding for the general resurrection to usher in the world that was to come. From the invisible world Jesus stepped forth once more into the world of phenomena, and so testified still more clearly to the fact that the new world was close at hand.

St Paul, who was himself vouchsafed an appearance of the risen Christ, grasped the meaning of the Resurrection of Jesus: the old world is passing away, the new world is at hand. Thereby the Christian hope received a mighty accession of strength. Again and again we have these two statements coupled together. As surely as God awakened Jesus so surely will He awaken us. But such were the thoughts of the earliest Christians as well. What is new in St Paul’s conception of the resurrection is the meaning that he discovers in it for this present life.

The positive and negative elements seemed to him to be necessarily combined in the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus. The Son of God had come into this world only to die because of it, and to succumb to its evil powers. But no sooner was He awakened from the dead than His life began in the world beyond, the true world.

All this seemed to Paul to be typical and symbolical, and that in very many ways. Did it not imply that man had bidden farewell to all the former world, and that the new world had already dawned? Death, sin, the flesh, the descent from Adam—their power was broken, their reign was at an end, But the new sun was fast rising, and its rays were already illuminating the Christian life.

To express this in theological language was, however, rather more difficult. Again we have an historical fact—to be sure, it was a miracle—to start with. Now, was this miracle to imply the transition from the old world to the new? It was evident that death, sin, and the flesh still continued in the world. The Resurrection of Jesus did not put an end to all this. Nevertheless, St Paul persists in connecting the crisis in the world’s history with this one fact.

The end of death is, of course, one of the things to be awaited. But flesh and sin are to be laid aside. How can that be done, seeing that Paul himself still lives in the flesh, and very many Christians still in sin? St Paul gives two explanations, and the one contradicts the other.

On the one hand, as he looks at life as it really is, he takes refuge in ethical theory, in the categorical imperative. Christ’s death and resurrection ought to imply for all Christians the death of their own sin and selfishness, and the beginning of the new life. On all occasions St Paul insisted clearly and impressively on this imperative.