Paul Wernle · 23 of 30

Chapter XV> The Pauline Soteriology. · Part 4

By thus striving to overcome the obstacles on the road to redemption through work, faith, and hope, the Christian at length attains to the certainty of salvation, so that he can stand on the everlasting foundations even now, in the midst of tribulation and distress. The assurance of salvation is explained by the theory of election—Paul starts from the following proposition: That which is eternal cannot have arisen in time. If the Christian, therefore, is certain of his eternal salvation, then this must have been determined upon by God before all time. God chose certain individual men and women before the creation of the world, even those who possess this certainty, and foreordained that they should become brothers of Christ and children of God. In consequence of this election by God, all that happens to them for their salvation follows in an inevitable succession. Every imaginable evil may befall such chosen children of God—it matters not, their lives are marked out for them, they must reach the goal. All works for their good and brings them nearer to the goal. Even were a devil to get possession of them, he would have to work God’s will and bring them forward on the road to salvation. So St Paul thought of himself: God separated me from my mother’s womb: so each true Christian may think, and from this standpoint count his whole past with all its guilt as a part of God’s plan.

St Paul thought that all Christians should attain to this consciousness of election. He did not, however, transmit his belief to the Church. Experience showed only too plainly that being baptized and being saved are too different things. The individual is to attain to salvation in the Church but not through the Church. St Paul prescribed no particular method for the acquisition of the assurance of salvation. As tokens he mentions now the love felt for God, now the faith in the Cross, and now the voice of the Spirit. In the end it is found to be a personal experience. No man can tell his brother what it is; he must discover it himself. God is faithful, and He will complete the good work which He has begun; so St Paul would reassure those of a wavering and doubting temperament. Here, however, there is a gap in the apostle’s apologetic system. Strict consistency demanded that entrance into the Church should guarantee salvation. St Paul meets this demand half-way when he connects salvation with faith. But he does not pursue this line of reasoning to its ultimate conclusion. In the end salvation is a matter which the individual has to settle with his God. Hereby we see that St Paul was more than an apologist for the Church: he was a disciple of Jesus.

The Theory of the Postulates for the Future.

Here, too, the needs of the apostle’s apologetic system unite with his personal hopes. The vast edifice of the doctrine of salvation is as yet unfinished. To complete the structure St Paul will have to look beyond this present world, so experience teaches him. But the Christian does not grope about in an uncertain and imaginary future which can be depicted according to individual fancy. The nature of the future world can, on the contrary, be safely predicted from our knowledge of the present. There are two facts which cast a bright light on this future world: the Resurrection of Christ and the possession of the Spirit. From the resurrection of Christ we may infer that our own resurrection will exalt us into a higher state. We shall be transformed, and our bodies will be like that of Christ. From the possession of the Spirit, it follows that we shall have a spiritual body, one in which the Spirit shall no longer dwell as a strange guest. But besides this—here St Paul is employing the methods of Jewish apologetics—we may learn a great deal as to the nature of the end of human history from the description of its beginning in the first chapters of Genesis, for all things revert to their origin.

From these data we can derive a clear picture of the Pauline eschatology in its principal features, distinguishing its negative from its positive elements. All that is hostile to God throughout the whole sphere of salvation must be conquered, destroyed, or at least subdued. Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God. They are taken up into something higher. All the hostile angelic powers are cast down and subjected to the dominion of Christ. Finally, the last enemy, death, is vanquished. And, on the other hand, the dead rise up, they enter into everlasting life, into the spiritual world, as it was in the beginning of all things. All Nature lays aside once more its garments of corruption and stands, instead, clothed in glory in the presence of God. And Christians now have spiritual and heavenly bodies, they are clothed in the bright robes of Paradise, they are fashioned like unto the image of Christ and stand around Him like brothers round the first born. Now all creation is once more good, and God is all in all, as He was before the creation of the world.

These are the principal features of the eschatology;. they are perfectly clear and in this form peculiar to St Paul. There are several features of the Jewish apologetic which point in the same direction—e.g., the idea of a transformation of the body, but nowhere so simple and consistent a system. St Paul, it is true, completes this system by the addition of many traditional details derived from Jewish apologetics. To the principal features he added: the Antichrist, the arrival of Messiah, the restoration of Israel, the day of judgment, the millennium, Paradise and others. The process of transformation is also conceived in a thoroughly Jewish fashion with many wonders and catastrophes, and as of old, this earth is to be the scene of the kingdom of God. But all this is relatively of little importance compared with that which alone really matters—the immense progress in the spiritualization of the eschatology. We enter into a new world, a spiritual kingdom. The earthly joys of Jesus’ promise, the glad eating and drinking at His table, have gone. Paul retains, however, what Jesus desired above all else—communion with God in a higher, an eternal state of existence. Taking this, therefore, as the essential, he leaves all the phenomenal apparatus on one side and so completes the spiritual process which Jesus had begun. God and eternity—that is the real issue at stake. The Christian is to strike out of his hope all that is of the earth, phenomenal and individual; it belongs to flesh and blood, not to the Spirit.

With these brief indications he has left us a number of unsolved problems. (1) Is the resurrection and transformation of the body one event, or are they two separate occurrences which succeed each other rapidly? On one occasion, St Paul says plainly, the dead shall rise incorruptible; on another he speaks of the awakening of the mortal body, when he explains to the Corinthians that the body belongs to the Lord and not to fornication; and founds his explanation on the message of the resurrection. He appears to presuppose that this mortal body will in the first instance rise again. Is it not contained in the very conception of resurrection and transformation that the old body will first of all arise from the grave and only afterwards be changed? (2) Does Paul expect a resurrection of all men, or only of Christians? In the most important chapter he only mentions the resurrection of Christians, but in the course of his missionary preaching he brings all the just and the unjust before the judgment throne of God. But even if the unbelievers participate in the resurrection, the spiritual body cannot surely be granted them. We do not find any definite mention of hell—the word itself does not even occur. Is it possible that he conceived of ordinary death as a final punishment? (3) When does the judgment take place? Does it coincide with the second coming of the Messiah? or is it postponed till the end of Messiah’s reign, or does it take place progressively in the gradual victory over the enemies of God? The conception of the single day of judgment seems to be the prevailing one. But then can the new body in this case be said to exist before the final judgment has been pronounced? All these are questions which admit of no clear answer—for us, but not for St Paul. Probably St Paul pictured the occurrences in the after-world somewhat after the manner of the Apocalypse of Baruch. First, all men arise with their mortal bodies, and thus appear on the day of judgment immediately after the parousia. Not till then does God deliver His judgment, allotting death to one man, and to another the transfiguration of the body and everlasting life. If these suppositions are correct, then St Paul’s position is much more nearly that of the popular hope of the resurrection than certain phrases in 1 Cor. xv. allowed us to suppose; in this chapter, however, he is trying to meet the Greeks as far as possible.

But is it true that all men are condemned either to life or to death? Isolated texts in St Paul’s Epistles appear to give expression to the bold thought that all men shall be saved. “As in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.” “As through one trespass the judgment came unto all men to condemnation, even so through one act of righteousness the free gift came unto all men to justification of life.” “God hath shut up all unto disobedience that He might have mercy upon all.” On these passages later theologians have based their hope of a universal restoration. But on insufficient grounds. As soon as the texts are read in connection with the context it is evident that St Paul is only thinking of Christians. In his enthusiasm his expressions are somewhat rhetorical. Surely the great apologist of the Church did not build up his whole doctrine of salvation, closely connecting each part with the other, in order finally to cast it on one side. And if in the whole course of his missionary preaching he starts from the presupposition that there are lost and saved, two sharply divided classes, then he does not think of rendering his presuppositions on which the whole of his work rests illusory in the end. For clear-thinking ethical natures such of those of Jesus and St Paul, it is a downright necessity to separate heaven and hell as distinctly as possible. It is only ethically worthless speculations that have always tried to minimize this distinction. Carlyle is an instance in our own times of how men even to-day once more enthusiastically welcome the conception of hell as soon as the distinction between good and bad becomes all-important to them.

Other passages in the letters have given rise to the opinion that in the course of his life St Paul gradually receded more and more from the Jewish hope of the resurrection and approximated to the Greek hope of immortality in the after-world. We hear of the apostle’s wish to enter into the eternal house of God in heaven as soon as his earthly tabernacle is dissolved, or of his longing to depart and be with Christ. That appears to point to something different to the old hope of the resurrection. But it is only appearance. The man who composed the great chapter on the resurrection in First Corinthians had not yet acquired the chameleon-like qualities of a modern theologian. The hope which he there expresses is certain truth for which he will live and die. Even from the imprisonment in Rome he writes: “If by any means I may attain unto the resurrection from the dead.” The resurrection, the transformation of the body, and the judgment—those are the absolutely fixed points in the Pauline eschatology, and it is at our peril that we try to meddle with them. The longing to die and be with Christ is for him identical with the hope in the resurrection. This longing spans the chasm that lies between death and the resurrection, and proceeds straight to the desired goal, to the meeting with Jesus. So likewise the martyr Ignatius hopes by death to come straight into the presence of God, passing across the abyss between death and the resurrection, of which he often makes mention. For the religious hope, death, resurrection, and the coming into the presence of God are one and the same thing, always and everywhere, not in St Paul’s case alone. And in like manner the passage as to the dissolution of the earthly tabernacle and the being clothed upon with the heavenly habitation, refers to the change at the time of the resurrection and to nothing else. The apostle would not then be found naked before God—i.e., in his mortal body—which appears to him to be nakedness (Gen. iii.) compared with the heavenly body, but he would be clothed immediately in the robes of glory. At bottom it is a matter of complete indifference to him what happens to his body before the resurrection. For he has found abiding comfort in this thought: “Whether we live we live unto the Lord, and whether we die we die unto the Lord; whether we live, therefore, or die we are the Lord’s.” A man possessing this sure comfort need invent no new hope for the after-world, but can content himself completely with the traditional Jewish representations. Beyond the dark passage which he shall have to traverse he knows that he shall be with Jesus, and that he shall enjoy the vision of God—that is the goal.

The Pauline eschatology was too exalted for the later Christians, too poor in the concrete pictures of the imagination. It was not the letters of St Paul but the Apocalypse that became the handbook for the doctrine of the last things. Since, however, they drew the longing for eternity from these letters and suffered his courage, his consolation and his joy to influence their lives, St Paul’s labours in their midst were not altogether fruitless.

St Paul was the first to build up a great theory of salvation. Before him salvation had been a matter of experience. No one had described it. Jesus made children of God of His disciples without uttering one word about salvation. Through Him they had become established in hope, and victorious in the pursuit of the good; the anguish of sin no longer beset them, the cares of this world no longer troubled them; death itself had lost its terrors. They were God’s children, living together with God as with their father. Upon the basis of this experience—his own as well as that of others—St Paul built up his soteriology. He called the power which produced all these single effects the Spirit of God, and united it with the historic Christ and the Gospel. The Spirit is nothing but the influence of the personality of Jesus in history.

But St Paul likewise built up this whole theory of redemption as an apologist in the service of the Church. The Spirit was attached to the Church and its institutions. He made out all men outside of the Church to be as bad as possible, he set up the Christ of the Church as the only Saviour, and praised the Christian ideal, as it is possessed by the Church, as the greatest thing in the world. Thereby his soteriology obtained that definite ecclesiastical character with which it shortly afterwards passed over into Catholicism.

By constructing this theory of redemption St Paul united the Gospel of Jesus with a cosmology and a theology which in spite of many Jewish conceptions was bound to be welcomed by the decaying ancient world on account of its pessimism, its new myths, its ideal, its doctrine of hope. Jesus, His influence and His Church, were here introduced into the drama of the great world. All that was merely Jewish and national was weeded out; there remained the story of the fall and of the redemption of creation. And conversely, all the hopes and longings, the thoughts and imaginations of the ancient world came to crystallize round the person of Jesus, and so acquired consistency and the sense of reality. Thus, then, the background had been found for Jesus, and the centre for the philosophy of the world and of salvation. That was the work of St Paul.