Paul Wernle · 22 of 30

Chapter XV> The Pauline Soteriology. · Part 3

But who can fail to recognize that the entire theory of the effects of the Spirit, which, starting from miraculous forces, derives from one and the same source all knowledge, the life of prayer and moral action, is nothing but the description of the Christian ideal drawn by an enthusiastic apostle? The actual state of things, the condition of the congregations, corresponded here and there with this ideal, but contradicted it in the vast majority of cases. A theory of the Christian life as it should be universally is here built up upon isolated great experiences. So Paul spoke to the Gentiles that he might sing the praises of Christianity, and to the Christians in order that they might be urged on to the attainment of the ideal by the description thereof. This apologetic character of the doctrine of the Spirit is rendered still plainer by all that follows.

St Paul terms the Spirit, Spirit of God or Spirit of Christ, and both phrases mean the same thing. The identification is by no means a matter of course. It is the apostle’s doing, and his object is the subordination of mysticism, under the influence of the Jesus of history.

The phrase ‘Spirit of God’ is certainly a very obscure expression; its meaning depends entirely upon the conception of God held by the man that uses it. He who represents God to himself as the impersonal first cause of the world, or as the negation of the world, will conceive the Spirit of God as the mysterious forces of nature which proceed from this first cause. This conception of God and His Spirit is the cradle of all the later history of mysticism. The phrase ‘Spirit of Christ,’ on the other hand, is perfectly intelligible, and derives its meaning from the Jesus of history. Rightly understood, it is bound to render the evanescence of religion into mysticism utterly impossible.

St Paul’s universal experience in founding his congregations was that they became the scenes of a wild enthusiasm which was certainly connected with faith in Jesus, but had in reality nothing whatever to do with Jesus Himself. The breach with their former heathen life, the concentration of their thoughts on the after world that was so near at hand, their renunciation of this world, the feeling that they were safe in port, all combined to drive many Christians into a whirlpool of religious sensations. The religious life had been aroused, and dominated them exclusively. Plain civic duties and ordinary everyday work were neglected. Idleness, ascetic tours de force, selfish fanaticism, an exaggerated zeal for certain spiritual gifts, were on the increase. St Paul cut off all that was unhealthy and dangerous. Yet he still allowed enough and to spare of that enthusiasm to continue, which originated, not from the influence of Jesus, but from the untrammelled religious impulse. It is very significant that in speaking about these gifts of the Spirit—e.g., talking with tongues, healing, etc.,-—St Paul never uses the words ‘Spirit of Christ;’ just as, conversely, when he does use them, he never has such manifestations in view. Without denying the divine element in them, he suggests indirectly that these phenomena are in no wise specifically Christian. Indeed, they almost belong more to the universal history of religion than to the history of the religion of Jesus.

On the other hand, St Paul spares no effort in his endeavour to bring the Spirit under the influence of Jesus. This he does, firstly, by forming the expressions ‘Spirit of Christ,’ ‘Spirit of the Son of God,’ and next, and in a still higher degree, by placing Christ and the Spirit side by side with each other, and even identifying them with regard to their influence upon Christians. This last he effects by a threefold series of propositions: Christ lives in the believer; the believer lives in Christ; the believer died and rose again with Christ. In stating the second of these propositions, even the grammatical expression which St Paul employed—‘in Christ’—is exactly parallel to the words ‘in the Spirit,’ which were used in other cases. Now by this means the whole doctrine of redemption is apparently doubled. We have a theory of the Spirit and a theory of Christ, the aim of which is, after all, exactly the same—the renewal of life. Therefore the Spirit and Christ must be identical, as indeed we should infer from the very expression ‘Spirit of Christ,’ which connects the two conceptions. What, then, is the meaning of this identity? It is by no means a dilution of the idea of Christ into any thing impersonal or abstract: this is the last thing of which the man who had seen Christ would think. On the contrary, it is the Christianization of the Spirit, who is thereby transformed from an impersonal force of nature into the historical influence of the person of Jesus. This is St Paul’s great reform. He firmly established the connection between the Redeemer and the redemption of believers. These were two separate things for the earlier Christians. On the one hand was the picture of Jesus, such as it passed over into the Gospels, and on the other were wonderful phenomena, tongues, etc., as effects of the Spirit. Between the two there is no connection, nor can there possibly be any as long as the sphere of the Spirit’s operation is merely the abnormal. St Paul teaches Christians to recognize the working of the Spirit above all else in the renewal of their lives, but this is the effect of the teaching of Jesus; Christ and the Spirit are therefore immediately seen to be one—or, to express the same thing more concisely, Paul will acknowledge no other power in the lives of Christians, by the side of the influence of Jesus. The logical consequence of his reasoning would have been to abandon the conception of ‘Spirit’ altogether in favour of the personal influence of the historic Christ. It would have been better so for all future time, for under the title ‘Spirit of God,’ all that was alien to the Spirit of Jesus crept into the new religion. That which hindered St Paul from drawing this conclusion was at bottom merely the general atmosphere of thought of the ancient world. Like all the rest of his contemporaries, the apostle was bound to recognize an immediate divine influence in these wonders and manifestations of power.

But it was Paul the apologist who completed this subordination of the Spirit to Christ. The Jews spoke of the Spirit of God, and the Greeks might also have used the same words. But the Spirit of Christ is naturally the peculiar possession of Christians. For what purpose should Christ have come into the world, if it turned out later that there was another road to salvation apart from Him? On one single occasion (in Gal. iv.) St Paul speaks of the sending of the Spirit as of something separate by the side of the sending of the Son; but no, it is the Spirit of the Son of God Himself. The salvation of believers can only be effected by the Saviour. St Paul cannot admit any other way. Without this nexus of conceptions the whole edifice of his apologetic would be undermined. The doctrine, however, was. it must be admitted, attended by a peculiar difficulty. We, to day, can speak of the Spirit of Jesus because we know Jesus from the Gospels. Now St Paul does not know Him; he only saw the heavenly Jesus, and that for a moment. Where was the guarantee that he understood the Spirit of Jesus? It is just here that the continuity with the Jesus of history seems to be broken. But facts prove that St Paul knew Jesus in spite of all—yes, knew Him better than all his predecessors. What he brought to the Greeks was no mere product of his imagination, but the real Jesus with His promise, His claim and His redemption. When Paul writes, “He that hath not the Spirit of Christ is none of His,” “He that is in Christ Jesus is a new creature,” he is filled with a profound and genuine impression of the person of Christ, and though it was only as apologist that he gave the final form to his doctrines, yet in this point he was right. Whatever of genuine Christian life was lived in the times to come, has its source exclusively in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, or as St Paul writes, in the Spirit of Christ.

The means of grace.

The Spirit of Christ does not enter when and where it will. It is bound to certain outer and inner media. The most important of the latter is faith. St Paul became a Christian without the help of any ecclesiastical organization, but not without faith in Christ. He had to bring that to the vision of Christ which the others had to bring to the preaching of Jesus. The parallel with the miracles of Jesus here strikes one’s attention. Just as want of faith prevented Jesus from performing miracles, so the Spirit, in spite of all the forces at its command, cannot take up its abode with any unbeliever. In neither case is faith the final cause but solely the condition.

What is faith in this connection? Not primarily that which it came to be later—the acceptation of a number of formula? as true; just as little as this was the faith which Jesus demanded. Faith can best here be defined as readiness and receptivity for the work of redemption. When Paul begins his preaching of death and judgment, of the Cross and Resurrection, as God’s great acts of redemption, these all depend upon whether or not his hearer recognizes something divine therein, something that has to do with his own redemption. He needs not to understand the connection of the propositions. As soon as it dawns upon him, “this Jesus concerns me and my salvation,” then faith has been awakened in him. Consciousness of a divine power unto salvation in the mighty drama of Jesus that, and nothing but that, is faith. Forthwith, peace with God, the love of God, and the certainty of atonement, make their entry into the hearts of men. This St Paul himself experienced and perceived in countless other instances.

If we ask in the next place whether this faith is a free act on the part of man, or whether it is God working in him, then it is very hard to say what answer St Paul would have given. The different parts of his doctrine of salvation are as a matter of fact so closely connected together that there is very little room for the exercise of man’s free will; in man there dwells no good thing—but yet there is the longing for salvation. The doctrines of grace and of predestination appear to exclude any co-operation on the part of man in the work of redemption. If God determines who is to belong to the saved and to the lost, then faith as a condition of salvation must be reckoned as a part of that which God decrees.

But for another reason determinism cannot be said to be St Paul’s final answer. St Paul is a missionary and an apologist. As such, he is bound to count upon the freedom of his hearers. He would lose his missionary zeal, the fire of his eloquence and the ardour of his love, if he did not hope to attain his end thereby amongst men free to choose. He must often have exclaimed—like a Methodist preacher—“Now is the acceptable time, now is the day of salvation; be ye reconciled with God. Let not God’s grace be offered you in vain.” He who thus appeals to the feelings of his hearers does not believe that the season of grace for each individual amongst them has passed long ago. And so we find St Paul in the Epistle to the Romans counting it a fault in the Jews that they shut up their hearts against the faith in their false zeal for righteousness. Even thus it is as yet not active co-operation that is called for, but something purely passive—readiness to receive God’s gift. Afterwards, it is true, St Paul leaves this, his first position, far behind him, when he makes salvation depend upon the acceptance of certain definite formulae; on the faith that Jesus is the Lord and that God raised Him from the dead, or on faith in His death. Consciously or unconsciously the ecclesiastical creed has here been forced upon the apologist, in the place of the mere receptivity of former times. And the creed at any rate is a human piece of work. Nay, more, for apologetic purposes this conception of faith is the only one that is practical. The preaching of the Church necessitates the ecclesiastical creed. The way of salvation is through the Church. Since then, this great word ‘faith’ has been used many thousand times to describe the entrance into the Church for those that stand without and to exhort them thereto.

Of the external means through which the Spirit of God works upon them that draw nigh, the word of God is the most essential. Faith is awakened when the word is preached. In St Paul’s own case, of course, this does not apply. But not every one is called by a vision from heaven. St Paul’s opinion of the importance and power of the word or Gospel was exceedingly high. In it God’s power unto salvation is brought near to men. Therefore it is God’s word and not man’s. Here indeed the apostle is in entire agreement with his Master, whose employment of parables is a testimony to the importance He attached to the word. The flood-tides of every religion have always coincided with the supremacy of the free word and with its exaltation high above all liturgies, sacraments, and the like. For it is only in the clear word that both the spiritual and the intelligible elements in a religion find expression, and behind the word stands the personality of the apostles. It is just owing to the high estimate which he had of the word that St Paul looked upon himself and the apostles as means of salvation. God’s message of atonement is only completed through the apostles, who carry it forth and publish it abroad. It is only where apostles have been bringing the word of God with them, that faith can arise and the Spirit enter.

We pass next to that which is really the most important of all the means of salvation, the Church, i.e., the whole Christian organism. The demand for faith—i.e., for entrance into the Church—proves that the Spirit is bound to the Church, and this is further indirectly proved by the fact that the Spirit nowhere has an abiding place outside of Christianity. But St Paul also adopted the most appropriate metaphor to express this theory, the Church as the body of Christ. Therefore Christ is the Spirit of the Church. Thereby he unites Christ and the Church so firmly to each other as only the Catholic system has done besides. For as yet no need had arisen for the division of the Church into visible and invisible. This need only arose when it became evident that the sad experience which even St Paul had had, was not transitory but belonged to the essence of the Church here on earth. St Paul did not as yet believe this. He looked at the good and bright sides in his congregations, and trusted that the bad, however often it appeared, would meet with a determined resistance and be bound to disappear. The high esteem in which he did, as a matter of fact, hold his congregations, here combined with his apologetic thesis that the Spirit could work upon Christians within the Church alone. The power and the truth of his apologetic depends upon the former, the actual fact. Later, when Church and community diverged, it appeared to be a mockery that the Church should be a mediator of the Spirit of Jesus. Had it not become the home of all these elements which had gradually grown up in opposition to the real Jesus? How entirely different was the situation which St Paul partly already found and partly himself created. There was a rivalry of love in the Churches, a readiness of sacrifice, fearless renunciation of the world, a strict morality, mutual co-operation, a glowing hope for the future, an enthusiastic eagerness to suffer for Jesus. In spite of much that was disappointing, it must have been a delight then to strike a blow in defence of the Church. There was a great element of truth in the proposition, “The Church is the channel of the Spirit of Christ.”

St Paul made a very free use of the metaphors in tended to express the relationship between Christ and the Church. Now it is body and spirit, now body and head, and again man and wife. At times he pursues the image into minute details without much taste, after the manner of contemporary allegories. But the very change of metaphor proves the indissolubility of the quantities compared. Christ and the Church form a unity for St Paul which nothing can put asunder. Now, however new this relation may be, the value attached to the Church in itself is old and Jewish. Paul destroyed the Jewish Church for Christians, opposing the community of believers to the legal organization. These are great reforms. But the conception of Church itself remained, and to a certain extent even the way of looking at religion as a constitution. The thesis, “extra ecclesiam nulla salus,” had hitherto only been maintained by the Jewish theology. Through St Paul it obtained a firm footing in the Christian communities. Here the apostle of liberty paves the way for the Catholicism of later times.

The same remark applies to the remaining means of salvation, baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Hitherto they had been valued as signs of membership, baptism as a condition of redemption besides. But it was Paul who first created the conception of a sacrament. Any external acts—here bathing, eating, and drinking—are turned into sacraments as soon as they are esteemed to be means of salvation. They are thereby stamped as something different from what they really are: the element of mystery and the miraculous takes possession of them, they come to be the instruments of divine power. This result St Paul achieved in the case of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Baptism was not of supreme importance for himself personally. It conferred no new gift upon the man who had been vouchsafed the vision of Christ. As missionary, too, he had not regarded baptizing as his office. God had not sent him forth for that. Even the great idea of dying and rising again with Christ appears in the Epistle to the Galatians without any mention of baptism. It is only in the Epistle to the Romans that St Paul makes use of it to elucidate this idea. But here, it is true, he employs altogether sacramental language of baptism, and parallel passages can be found in other letters. He would have baptism regarded as a miracle and a mystery. The baptized convert should believe that he steps forth from the water a different person to what he was when he entered it. In like manner he taught of the Lord’s Supper, that it was a meal at which one eats no ordinary bread and drinks no ordinary wine, but partakes of the body and blood of Christ. It was a spiritual food and a spiritual drink—i.e., a channel for the conveyance of the powers of salvation. It is hard to understand how St Paul, who elsewhere always connects redemption with the Spirit of Christ, here all at once attaches a value to the body and blood, i.e., to that which was after all perishable in Jesus. The reason probably is that he found here an institution already existing which could only obtain a place in his spiritual doctrine of salvation with extreme difficulty. But he did find a place for it, and thereby made it a sacrament. He had to educate his heathen converts, and with this end in view it appeared to him to be important that they should clearly realize their redemption in certain ceremonial actions. As a matter of fact he only confused them thereby, dragging them down from the spiritual sphere into that of natural magic. It appears to us at the present day exceedingly strange that the hero of the Word should at the same time have become the creator of the sacrament. He himself—every one who knows anything about St Paul knows that—needed no ceremonial magic, as the Spirit within him testified to him of God’s love, and Jesus had set him free from the ceremonies of the law. But through the reception of the sacraments into his doctrine of redemption, he has himself a share in the origin of that Catholicism which made him a saint while at the same time it stamped out his spirit.

Obstacles to Salvation, and the way to overcome them.

Salvation as St Paul conceives of it, is in its essence the imparting of a divine power. Men cannot save themselves—they are sick, powerless, and prisoners. Then there comes to their help the power that has its origin in the world beyond, the Spirit. He takes over the guidance into his hands as effective cause. We ourselves are passive instruments driven by the Spirit. The aim of salvation is that the power from beyond should permeate everywhere and dominate all, absorbing entirely everything that is fleshly and sinful. Then shall the next world, the new heaven and the new earth, have come unto us.

But do we even attain to a complete salvation here in this world—when everything that is old hath passed away and all things have become new? No; salvation by the Spirit is thwarted by certain obstacles which stop its progress. Death is still with us, and announces its approach by sufferings which ever remind us of our perishable nature and drag us down from the heights of enthusiasm. The flesh is by no means dead or absorbed. The Christian feels his lusts and passions only too keenly. And sin? St Paul met with it at every step among his converts. At Corinth alone incest, fornication, lawsuits about property, party strife. And had it really departed even out of his own life? “Not that I have already obtained or am already made perfect.” The apostle had by nature a passionate and irritable temperament, temptations from within and from without, and at the same time a keen and highly sensitive conscience. It is inconceivable that he imagined himself free from sin.

Paul was no fanatic to shut his eyes to any unpleasant facts. Whenever he came across a sin he called it by its name. To hush things up or decently to throw a veil over them was never his way. He remained unaffected by the flowers of Greek rhetoric. It would be truer to say that he occasionally formed too gloomy a picture of the state of the whole community because of the sins or failings of a few. But he never lost courage. He clings firmly to his. apologetic theory of the ideal of redemption without admitting any limitations, and he sets to work to look the obstacles that lie in the way straight in the face and to overcome them.

First comes the summons to fight against the flesh, sin and the devil, to fight with all the power of one’s will. For it has been proved that the Spirit alone cannot do it. Man—i.e., his will—is to help the Spirit to victory by taming the lusts and passions, by hard work and strict self-discipline. Now here the categorical imperative and the thought of the end to be achieved reinforce the Spirit working according to laws of natural causation. Whether this is theoretically conceivable or not is a matter of indifference. Whenever St Paul expounds the theory of salvation he ends by this call to duty. And thereby he rendered experience her due. If we live in the Spirit let us also walk in the Spirit. We are debtors not to the flesh, but should through the Spirit mortify the deeds of the body. “Mortify, therefore, the members that are upon earth.” The apostle’s deep earnestness is well brought out by the severely ascetic form of these exhortations. He was able, at any rate, to say of himself that he mortified his own body and brought it into subjection, lest while he preached to others he himself should become a castaway. When he actually saw any sin in the course of his labours he forthwith exclaimed “away with it.” For this, in his opinion, was to constitute the difference between the redeemed and the unredeemed: that the former should at all times be able to fight a victorious fight. Through the Spirit he has been raised from his state of impotence and has become strong and bold. He should have no lack of courage and faith in victory; the ardent exhortations of the apostle will furnish him with an ever fresh supply breathing the same confidence in the power of the good as did the summons of Jesus.

If, however, in spite of all, the believer should have stumbled, then faith raises itself up again by the Cross of Jesus. For surely God’s love does not cease at our baptism. Why, that is when it really begins for us. As Christians we are under grace, and have the certainty of salvation from the wrath that is to come. It is not, of course, from ourselves that we derive any absolute guarantee of the abiding love of God. Even though the Spirit may impart to us in our hearts the certainty of the Sonship, who shall tell us exactly where the Spirit ceases and one’s own wish begins? The moments of ecstatic communion with God are succeeded, alas, often so swiftly, by hellish states of depression. The Christian only stands immovably fast in the love of God when he is not thrown upon his own resources, but can lay hold of what God Himself has done. It is only when he gazes upon God’s love as shown in the Cross that that comfort is vouchsafed him which is proof against every trial. Nowhere do we penetrate further into the depths of St Paul’s thoughts, nowhere recognize more clearly his sober sanity, his distrust of his own feelings, his need of an objective proof besides. Clearest of all is the following passage in the Galatians: first the triumphant exclamation:—“It is. no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me: . . . .” there is all the joy of the new redeemed life. This, however, is immediately succeeded by the chastening reflection: “And that life which I now live in the flesh”; ‘the old is after all not laid aside, I feel its presence only too often’; but then follows the brave consolation: “I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me.” It is not the Christ within us but solely the Christ without us, who leads us through all our anxiety to peace at the last. And from this fact every Christian may derive the certainty of forgiveness. Accordingly, St Paul everywhere recommends forgiveness, and himself forgives. As far as we know, he may have received even the incestuous person into communion again, when he saw that distress and sorrow were driving him to despair. Paul was no Tertullian whose rigid sense of justice placed insuperable obstacles in the path of pardoning love. So he leads his converts on to the glad faith, that in spite of the sin that doth yet beset him, the Christian can still remain a child of God, and can look forward joyfully to the day of judgment.

Our self-discipline and faith in God’s love do not, however, fully remove the obstacles in the way of salvation. Again and again the Christian finds himself entangled in this present evil world. Only one thing helps him in every difficulty, and that is hope. Hope alone permits the Christian to look at the world as it is, and to escape depression without wrapping himself up in any fictitious optimism. We walk by faith, not by sight. We are, it is true, saved, yet by hope. Here we see in a mirror darkly, and all our knowledge is fragmentary. We ourselves, though we have the first-fruits of the Spirit, groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of the body. The Spirit is an earnest of our future state, and not that state itself. Never did any man realize the imperfection of our present state more sincerely or truly. That is why no one can call him an idle enthusiast. This recognition, however, of the defects of our present state is but the necessary negative condition attaching to the positive hope in which St Paul’s message centres. This present world passeth away, and the salvation which has here been begun will soon be completed.

This leads us on of itself to the theory of the postulates for the future. The decisive factor here, however, is not the picture of his fancy, but the power of the yearning which draws its comfort thence. For this yearning Paul found words—think of the song of creation’s earnest expectation—which still to-day fill us, “ripae ulterioris amore”! For the details of eschatology are always more or less the product of this or that particular age, and therefore negligible for later ages. But the yearning itself, with all its consequences for the life of the apostle, courage, consolation, joy and patience, is that which speaks to men in all ages. The concluding verses of the 8th chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, in which trust in God is expressed as nowhere else in the New Testament, follow immediately after the song of the earnest expectation; and were it not for this confident hope in the future, they would lack all sound foundation.