James Denney · 11 of 19

Chapter 3. The Epistles of St. Paul · Part 5

(3) Further, the death involved in faith is repeatedly defined by St. Paul as a death to the law, or to law in general (Galatians 2:19; Romans 6:14 and 7:4). There is undoubtedly something paradoxical in this, and it is the point at which St. Paul’s gospel, from the beginning, was most misunderstood and most assailed. On the one hand, when Christ died, justice was done to the law of God, both as an imperative and as a condemning law, as it had never been done before. The will of God had been honored by a life of perfect obedience, and the awful experience of death in which God’s inexorable judgment on sin comes home to the conscience had been borne in the same obedience and love by His sinless Son. On the other hand, when this death evokes the faith for which it appeals, the righteous requirement of the law is fulfilled in the believer; the law gets its clue in his life also, or, as the apostle puts it, it is established by faith. How is it, then, that faith involves a death to the law? It is through the assurance, given to faith at the cross, that so far as doing the will of God is concerned, a new and living way has been found. It is not the law in its old legal form — the law of statutory injunctions and prohibitions — which is to generate goodness in sinful man; it is the law glorified in the atonement. The whole inspiration of the Christian life lies here, and it is an inspiration, not a statutory requirement. Nothing is to count in the life of a Christian which does not come with perfect freedom from this source. This explains the extraordinary emphasis which St. Paul everywhere lays on liberty. Liberty is the correlative of responsibility; man must be perfectly free that the whole weight of his responsibilities may come upon him. But this weight of responsibility cannot be faced, and would not sanctify even if it could be faced, in vacuo; it can be faced only when we know God in Christ crucified; and it does sanctify, when the constraint of the atonement, with its awful homage, to the holiness of God, descends upon the heart. But this is all that is required, for this is too great to be compromised by alliance with anything else. Perfect freedom, with entire responsibility to the Redeemer — the obligation to be a law to oneself, with the power of Christ’s passion resting upon the spirit — that is the death to law which St. Paul contemplates. No statutes, no traditions of men, no dogmata, intellectual or moral, no scruples in the consciences of others, are to have legal obligations for us any longer. Not even the letters written by the finger of God on the tables of stone constitute a legal obligation for the Christian. All that he is to be must come freely out of the atoning death of Christ. He is dead to the law — in the widest sense of the word, he is dead to law — through the body of Christ. From this freedom we are always being tempted to relapse. We are always establishing for ourselves, or letting others impose upon us, customs — whether intellectual, as creeds; or ethical, as the conventional ways of being charitable or of worshipping God — which though good in themselves, tend to corrupt the world just because they are customs — in other words, we are always tacitly denying that the death of Christ does full justice to law in every sense of the term, and that for those who believe in it law exists henceforth only in the divine glory of the atonement, and in the life which it inspires.

It may seem astonishing that in all this no reference has been made to the Spirit, but the omission, I think, can be justified. For one thing, St. Paul himself discusses the whole subject of the Christian’s death with Christ, as involved in Christ’s death and the Christian’s faith in it, without reference to the Spirit. The Spirit is not mentioned in the sixth chapter of Romans. I do not say it is not implied — for instance, in the allusions to baptism; but it is implied in all that the apostle says; it is not implied as something to be added to it. Theologically, the Spirit is the divine correlative of faith, and of the dying with Christ and living with Christ, of which we have been speaking; it is the power of God which is manifested in every Christian experience whatever. It is not something specifically divine which comes in through baptism and has no relation to faith and justification; it is related in the same way to all; it is the divine factor in all that restores man to, and maintains him in, the life of God. But the Spirit does not work in vacuo. He glorifies Christ. He works through the propitiation, interpreting, revealing, applying it; and when we talk of the Spirit as an abstractly supernatural power, a power of God not working through the gospel and its appeal to the reason, conscience, and will of man, we are not on Christian ground. Without the Spirit — that is, without God — all that has been said about the meaning of Christ’s death could not win upon men; but just because the action of the Spirit is implied as the correlative of faith at every point, it is illegitimate to call it in to explain one Christian experience more than another — for instance, to derive regeneration from it, or the new life, but not justification. Either Spirit or Faith may truly be said to be co-extensive with Christianity, and therefore they are co-extensive with each other. But if we are speaking of the new moral life of the Christian, and ask what we mean by the Spirit psychologically — that is, what form it takes as an experience — I should say it is indistinguishable from that infinite assurance of God’s love, given in Christ’s death, through which the Christian is made more than conqueror in all the difficulties of life, inward or external. It is with this assurance the Spirit is connected when St. Paul opens his discussion of the subject in Romans 5:5:

‘The love of God is shed abroad in our hearts through the Holy Spirit given to us.’

It is with this same assurance he concludes his discussion, ch. 8:35: ‘Who shall separate us from the love of God?’ The triumphant certainty of this love, a certainty always recurring to and resting on that miracle of miracles, the sin-bearing death of Christ, is the same thing as joy in the Holy Spirit, and it is this joy which is the Christian’s strength. From the Spirit, then, or from the love of God as an assured possession, the Christian life may equally be explained. And it is not another, but the same explanation, when we say that it is begotten and sustained from beginning to end by the virtue which dwells in the propitiatory death of Jesus.

(4) When we come to the epistles of the Imprisonment a new range seems to be given to Christ’s death, and to the work of reconciliation which is accomplished in it. This holds, at least, of the Epistles to the Colossians and Ephesians; so far as Philippians is concerned, we find ourselves in the same circle of ideas as in Galatians and Romans. The close parallel, indeed, of Philippians 3:9 f. with the exposition of the apostolic gospel in these earlier letters is a striking proof of the tenacity and consistency of St. Paul’s thought. But in Colossians we are confronted with a new situation. ‘The world’ which is the object of reconciliation is no longer as in 2 Corinthians 5:19, or Romans 319, the world of sinful men; it is a world on a grander scale.

‘God has been pleased through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, having made peace through the blood of His cross, through Him, whether they be things on earth or things in heaven’ (Colossians 1:20).

The reconciliation of sinful men is represented as though it were only a part of this vaster work.

‘And you,’ it is added, ‘who were once estranged, and enemies in mind by wicked works, He has now reconciled in the body of His flesh through death’ (1:21 f.).

The same ideas are found in the Epistle to the Ephesians (1:7 ff.). Here we start with the historical Christ, ‘in whom we have our redemption through His blood, even the forgiveness of our trespasses’; but when the mystery of Christ’s work is revealed to the Christian intelligence, it is seen to have as its end ‘the gathering together in one of all things in Him, both things in (or above) the heavens and things on the earth’ (1:10). This enlargement of the scope of Christ’s death, or, if we prefer to call it so, this extension of its virtue into regions where we cannot speak of it from experience, has sometimes had a disconcerting effect, and the bearings of it are not quite clear. It is argued by some, who naturally wish to be as precise as possible in interpreting their author, that ‘the things in heaven and the things on earth,’ which are referred to in the passages just quoted, must be spiritual beings; only such can be the objects of reconciliation, for only such can have estranged themselves from God by sin. But where do we find the idea of any such estrangement in Scripture, except in the case of disobedient angels to whom the idea of reconciliation is never applied? For answer we are pointed to various passages in the Old and the New Testament, not to mention Jewish literature outside, in which there is the conception of spiritual beings whose fortunes are somehow bound up with those of men. Thus in Isaiah 24:21, a late passage in which apocalypse begins to displace prophecy, we read,

‘It shall come to pass in that day that the Lord shall punish the host of the high ones on high, and the kings of the earth upon the earth.’

The two sets of persons here referred to somehow correspond to each other; there is a counter-part in the unseen world of the characters and fortunes visible on earth. Again, in the book of Daniel we hear of ‘the prince of the kingdom of Persia’ (ch. 10: 13), ‘the prince of Grecia’ (10: 20), and ‘your prince’ (10: 21), meaning the prince of the children of Israel, the princes, as the name Michael in 10:21 shows, being in all cases angelic beings, who in some way or other were identified with the nations, representing them in the unseen world, pleading their cause, fighting their battles, and mysteriously involved in their fortunes. It is something quite analogous to this that we find in the early chapters of Revelation, where the epistles of the risen Lord are addressed to the angels of the churches. The angel is not a bishop; he is, so to speak, the personification of the church in the world unseen; the spiritual counterpart of it, conceived as a person on whom its character and responsibilities will be visited somehow. It is the same idea, with an individual application, that we find in our Lord’s word about the angels of the little ones, who in heaven do always behold the face of His heavenly Father (Matthew 18:10), and again in the book of Acts (12:15), where the people who would not believe that Peter had been released from prison said, ‘It is his angel.’ On such a background of Jewish belief the interpretation of these passages has been essayed. It is not man only, we are asked to believe, who has been involved in sin, and in the alienation from God which is its consequence; the sin of man has consequences which reach far beyond man himself. It stretches downward through nature, which has been made subject to vanity because of it, and it stretches upward into a spiritual world which we may not be able to realize, but which, like nature, is compromised somehow by our sin, and entangled in our responsibility to God. For these higher beings, then, as well as for man, Christ has done His reconciling work, and when it is finished they as well as we will be gathered together in one in Him.

It would perhaps be going too far to say that there is nothing in this, and that no such ideas ever floated vaguely before the apostle’s imagination. The people to whom he wrote believed in ‘thrones and dominions and principalities and powers’; and although there is a touch of indifference, not to say scorn, in some of his own allusions to the high-sounding names — for instance, in Ephesians 1:22 f. — they had some sort of reality for the too. There are passages like Colossians 2:15, or those in which he refers to τὰ στοιχεῖα τοῦ κόσμου (Galatians 4:3 and Colossians 2:8), where he seems to connect the spiritual beings in question with the angels through whom the law was given (Galatians 3:19, Acts 7:53 and Galatians 2:2), and to represent the superseding of Judaism by Christianity as a victory of Jesus over these inferior but refractory powers to whom for a while the administration of human affairs, and especially of the immature, materialistic and legal stages of religion had been committed. But if he had definitely held such a view as has just been expounded, the probabilities are that it would have told more decidedly on his thinking, and found less ambiguous expression in his writings. He could not, for example, have given that complete account of his gospel — of the need for a righteousness of God, of the provision of it, and of the vindication of it — which he does give in Romans 1-8, without so much as alluding to these vaguely conceived beings. At best they could belong only to the quasi-poetical representation of his faith, not to the gospel which he preached on the basis of experience, nor to the theology or philosophy which was its intellectual expression. And when we look at the epistles of the Captivity generally, our minds are rather drawn in another direction. The enlarged scope of the work of reconciliation is part of that expansion, so to speak, of Christ’s person from a historical to a cosmical significance which is characteristic of these epistles as a whole. Christ is no longer a second Adam, the head of a new humanity, as in the earlier letters (Romans 5:12 ff. and 1 Corinthians 15:45 ff.); He is the center of the universe. He is a person so great that St. Paul is obliged to reconstruct His whole world around Him. He is the primary source of all creation, its principle of unity, its goal (Colossians 1:15 ff.). In consistency with this, the meaning and efficacy of what He has done extends through it all. His Person and work have absolute significance; wherever we have to speak of revelation or of reconciliation, in whatever world, in whatever relations, it is of Him we have to speak. Whether St. Paul would have presented this genuinely Christian truth to his imagination in the somewhat fantastic fashion just explained may be more or less doubtful; in any case it is of little consequence. What is of consequence is his conviction that in Jesus Christ dwelt all the fullness of the Godhead — all that makes God in the full sense of the term God — bodily, that is, in organic unity and completeness; and that the same completeness and finality belong to His reconciling work, ‘The blood of His cross’: It is in this we find the resolution of all discords, not only in the life of man, but in the universe at large. It is in this we see a divine love which does not shrink from taking on itself to the uttermost the moral responsibility for the world it has made, and for all the orders of being in it, and all their failures and fortunes. The eternal truth of this different ages and circumstances will picture to themselves in different ways; all we need to care for is that ways of picturing it which are uncongenial to our imaginations do not deprive us of the truth itself.

It is a smaller but not a less attractive application of the idea of reconciliation, as accomplished in Christ’s death, when we find it in the second chapter of Ephesians as the reconciliation of Jew and Gentile in the one body of Christ (vv. 11-22). The application may to us seem casual, but this is one of the great thoughts of St. Paul. ‘Is God a God of Jews only?’ he asks in Romans 3:29 as he contemplates Christ set forth as a propitiation in His blood. Is the great appeal of the Cross one which is intelligible only to men of a single race, or to which only those who have had a particular training can respond? On the contrary, there is nothing in the world so universally intelligible as the Cross; and hence it is the meeting-place not only of God and man, but of all races and conditions of men with each other. There is neither Greek nor Jew, male nor female, bond nor free, there. The Cross is the basis of a universal religion, and has in it the hope of a universal peace. But of all Christian truths which are confessed in words, this is that which is most outrageously denied in deed. There is not a Christian church nor a Christian nation in the world which believes heartily in the Atonement as the extinction of privilege, and the leveling up of all men to the same possibility of life in Christ, to the same calling to be saints. The spirit of privilege, in spite of the Cross, is obstinately rooted everywhere even among Christian men.

An examination of the pastoral epistles, quite apart from the critical questions that have been raised as to their authorship, does not introduce us to any new ideas on our subject. It is at all events genuinely Pauline when we read in 1 Timothy 2:5,

‘There is one God, one Mediator also between God and men, Himself man, Christ Jesus, who gave Himself a ransom for all (ἀντίλυτρον ὑπὲρ πάντων).’

It is the ransoming death in virtue of which Jesus does mediate between God and sinners; but for it, He would not be a mediator in any sense relevant to man’s situation. This, as Holtzmann has noticed, is in harmony with the use of mediator in the Epistle to the Hebrews. There also Jesus is Mediator, but it is of a covenant which is characterized as κρείττων, καινή, and νέα; He is the means through which, at the cost of His death, sinners enter into the perfect religious relation to God. But though this idea is found in Hebrews, it does not follow that it is unpauline in itself, nor even (though ἀντίλυτρον found here only in the New Testament) that it is unpauline in expression. The dying with Christ, referred to in 2 Timothy 2:6, is akin rather to what we have found in 2 Corinthians chs. 1 and 4 than to Romans 6: it is a share in martyr sufferings which is meant, not for many the mortification of the old man. In Titus there are two passages which require to be mentioned. The first is in ch. 2:14, where we read of our Savior Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for us that He might redeem us from all unrighteousness (ἀνομίας) and purify for Himself a people of His own, zealous of good works.’ It is somewhat peddling to suggest, as Holtzmann does, that Paul would rather have said we were redeemed from νόμος than from ἀνομία, and that even in touching on a Pauline thought an unpauline expression is used (λυτρώσηται for ‘redeem’). The whole expression, λυτροῦσθαι as well as ἀνομία, comes from Psalm 130:8, and St. Paul might have liberty to quote the Old Testament as well as anybody else. Nevertheless, the general impression one gets from the pastoral epistles is, that as a doctrine Christianity was now complete and could be taken for granted; it is not in process of being hammered out, as in the Epistle to the Galatians; there is nothing creative in the statement of it; and it is the combination of fullness and of something not unlike formalism that raises doubts as to the authorship. St. Paul was inspired, but the writer of these epistles is sometimes only orthodox. One feels this with reference to the second passage in Titus (3:4 ff.):

‘When the kindness of God our Savior, and His love toward man, appeared, not by works done in righteousness which we did ourselves, but according to His mercy He saved us, through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Ghost, which He poured out upon us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior that, being justified by His grace, we might be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life.’

St. Paul could no doubt have said all this, but probably he would have said it otherwise, and not all at a time. In any case, it adds nothing to the New Testament teaching on the death of Christ as we have already examined it.