James Denney · 9 of 19

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

‘He died for all, that they which live should not live unto themselves, but to Him who died for them and rose again.’

It took no less than His death for them to bring into their life a motive of such creative and recreative power; and it takes no less than this being made sin for them to open for them the possibility of becoming God’s in Him. To say so is not to bring different things into an artificial correspondence. The two statements are but the ethical and the theological representation of one and the same reality; and it confirms our interpretation of the passage, and our of the coherence of the apostolic gospel, that under various and independent aspects we are continually coming on the same facts in the same relation to each other.

(3.) The closing verses of the fifth chapter of 2nd Corinthians may fairly be called the locus classicus on the death of Christ in St. Paul’s writings. Yet in proceeding to the Epistle to the Galatians we are introduced to a document which, more exclusively than any other in the New Testament, deals with this subject, and its significance. Even in the salutation, in which the apostle wishes his readers and peace from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, he expands the Savior’s name by adding, in a way unexampled in such a connection elsewhere,

‘who gave Himself for our sins that He might us from the present world with all its ills, according, to the will of our God and Father’ (1:4)

Reference has already been made to the vehement words in which he anathematizes man or angel who shall preach a different gospel. At the end of the second chapter he puts again, in the strongest possible form, his conviction that Christianity, the new and true religion, is a thing complete in itself, exclusive of everything else, incapable of compromise or of supplement, and that it owes this completeness, and if we choose to call it so, this intolerance, to the supreme significance and power which belong in it to the death of Christ.

‘I have been crucified with Christ my life is no longer mine, it is Christ who lives in me; the life I now live in flesh I live in faith, faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself up for me’ (2:20).

The whole of the Christian religion lies in that. The whole of Christian life is a response to the love exhibited in the death of the Son of God for men. No one can become right with God except by making the response of faith to this love — that is, except by abandoning himself unreservedly to it as the only hope for sinful men. To trust it wholly and solely is the only right thing a man can do in presence of it; and when he does so trust it he is completely, finally, and divinely right. To supplement it is, according to Paul, to frustrate the grace of God; it is to compromise the Christian religion in its very principle; and to such a sin St. Paul will be no party. If righteousness is by law, as he sums it up in one of his passionate and decisive words, then Christ died for nothing (2:21). St. Paul knew by experience that all he was, or could ever become as a Christian, came out of the Cross. This is why he could say to the Corinthians,

‘I determined to know nothing among you save Jesus Christ and Him crucified’ (1 Corinthians 2:2);

and why he repeats it in other words to the Galatians,

‘God forbid that I should glory save in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world is crucified to me and I to the world’ (Galatians 6:14).

Put positively, then, we may say that the aim of the Epistle to the Galatians is to show that all Christianity is contained in the Cross; the Cross is the generative principle of everything Christian in the life of man. Put negatively, we may say its aim is to show that law, and especially, as it happened, the ritual side of the Jewish law, contributes nothing to that life. Now St. Paul, it might be argued, had come to know this experimentally, and independently of any theory. When it had dawned on his mind what the Cross of Christ was, when he saw what it signified as a revelation of God and His love, everything else in the universe faded from his view. Newman speaks, in a familiar passage of the Apologia, of resting in ‘the thought of two, and two only, absolute and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator’; in the relations and interaction of these two his religion consisted. A religion so generated, though it may be very real and powerful, is, of course, something far poorer than Christianity; yet in a somewhat similar way we might say of St. Paul that for him the universe of religion consisted of the soul and the Son of God giving Himself up for it; all that God meant for him, all that he could describe as revelation, all that begot within him what was at once religion, life, and salvation, was included in this act of Christ. No law, however venerable; no customs, however dear to a patriotic heart; no traditions of men, however respectable in effect or intention, could enter into competition with this. It was dishonoring to Christ, it was an annulling of the grace of God, to mention them alongside of it. To do so was to betray a radical misapprehension of Christ’s death, such as made it for those who so misapprehended it entirely ineffective. ‘Ye are severed from Christ,’ St. Paul cries, ‘ye who would be by law; ye are banished from grace’ (5:4).

But though St. Paul had learned this by experience, he does not, in point of fact, treat this subject of law empirically. He does not content himself with saying, ‘I tried the law until I was worn out, and it did nothing for me; I made an exhaustive series of experiments with it, resultless experiments, and so I am done with it; through the law I have died to the law (2:19); it has itself taught me, by experience under it, that it is not the way to life, and so it is to me now as though it were not.’ He does not content himself with giving this as his experience of the law; nor does he, on the other hand, content himself with giving us simply and empirically his experience of Christ. He does not say, ‘Christ has done everything for me and in me. The constraint of His love is the whole explanation of my whole being as a Christian. By the grace of God, and by nothing else, I am what I am, and therefore the law is nothing to me: I am so far from finding myself obliged to acknowledge its claims still, that it is my deepest conviction that to acknowledge its claims at all is to frustrate the grace of God, to make void the Cross of Christ.’ Probably if he had written thus — and he might truly have written thus — it would have seemed attractive and convincing to many who have misgivings about what he actually has written. But St. Paul could not, and did not remain at this empirical standpoint. He has a theory again — or let us say an understanding — of the relations of Christ and law, which enables him to justify and comprehend his experience. But for the truths of which this theory is the vehicle, the death of Christ would not be what it is, or exercise over the soul the power which it does. It is some dim sense of these truths, truths which the theory does not import but only unfolds, which in every case gives the death of Christ its constraining influence upon sinful men. What, then, is the theory?

Briefly, it is summed up in the words, Christ under the law. This is the expression used in Galatians 4:4, and its indefiniteness, in this form, makes it seem unobjectionable enough. It signifies that when He came into the world Christ came under the same conditions as other men: all that a Jew meant when he said ‘Law’ had significance for him; the divine institutions of Israel had a divine authority which existed for him as well as for others. To say that the Son of God was made under the law would thus mean that He had the same moral problem in His life as other men; that He identified Himself with them in the spiritual conditions under which they lived; that the was a moral reality and not a mere show. But it is certain that this is not all that St. Paul meant; and to the writer, at least, it is not certain that St. Paul ever had this as a distinct and separate object of thought present to his mind at all. What he really means by ‘Christ under the law’ comes out in its full meaning in chapter 3 13: Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming curse for us. ‘Under the law,’ in short, is an ambiguous expression, and it is necessary to be clear as to which of two possible interpretations it bears in this case. In relation to man in general, the law expresses the will of God. It tells him what he must do to please God. It is imperative, and nothing more. We may say, of course, that Christ was under the law in this sense it is self-evident. But as has just been hinted, it is doubtful whether St. Paul ever thought of this by itself. To be under the law in this sense did not to him at least yield the explanation of Christ’s redeeming power. In the mere fact that Christ came to keep the law which was binding on all, there was no such demonstration of love to sinners as was sufficient, of itself, to make them new creatures. But this is not the only sense which can be assigned to the words, ‘under the law.’ The law has not only a relation to man as such, in which it expresses the will of God; it has a relation to men as sinners, in which it expresses the condemnation of God. Now Christ is our Redeemer, according to the apostle, because He was made under the law in this sense. He not only became man, bound to obedience — it is not easy to say where the omnipotent loving constraint is to be discovered in this; but He became curse for us. He made our doom His own. He took on Him not only the calling of a man, but our responsibility as sinful men; it is in this that His work as Redeemer lies, for it is in this that the measure, or rather the immensity, of His love is seen. To say, ‘He became a curse for us,’ is exactly the same as to say, ‘He was made sin for us,’ or ‘He died for us’ but it is infinitely more than to say, ‘He was made man for us’ — or even man bound to obedience to the law — a proposition to which there is nothing analogous in the New Testament. The conception of obedience, as applicable to the work of Christ, will recur in other connections; here it is enough to say that if we wish to put the whole work of Christ under that heading, we must remember that what we have to do with is not the ordinary obedience of men, but the obedience of a Redeemer. Christ had an ethical vocation, as St. Paul reminds us in the very first reference to His death in this epistle, ‘He gave Himself for our sins, to deliver us from the present evil world, according to the will of our God and Father’; but His vocation, in carrying out that redeeming will, was a unique one; and, according to St. Paul, its uniqueness consisted in this, that one who knew no sin had, in obedience to the Father, to take on Him the responsibility, the doom, the curse, the death of the sinful. And if any one says that this was morally impossible, may we not ask again, What is the alternative? Is it not that the sinful should be left alone with their responsibility, doom, curse, and death? And is not that to say that redemption is impossible? The obedience of the Redeemer transcends morality, if we will; it is something to which morality is unequal; from the point of view of ordinary ethics, it is a miracle. But it is the very function of the Redeemer to do the thing which it is impossible for sinful men to do for themselves or for each other; and St. Paul’s justification of the miracle is that it creates all the genuine and victorious morality — all the keeping of God’s commandments in love — which the world can show.

There have been many attempts, if not to evade this line of argument, and this connection of ideas, then to find something quite different in Galatians, which shall dispense with the necessity of considering it. Thus it is argued that St. Paul in the whole epistle is dealing with Jews, or with people who wanted to be Jews, and with their relation to the ceremonial law — a situation which no longer has reality for us. But this is hardly the case. St. Paul nowhere draws any distinction in the law between ceremonial and moral; the law for him is one, and it is the law of God. It is owing to accidental circumstances that the ceremonial aspect of it is more prominent in this epistle, as the ethical aspect is in Romans. But we shall find the same line of argument repeated in Romans, where it is the moral law which is at stake; and when the apostle tells us that through the law he has died to the law (Galatians 2:16), or that we have died to the law through the body of Christ (Romans 7:4), or that we are not under law but under grace (Romans 6:14), he has not the moral law any less in view than the ceremonial. He means that nothing in the Christian life is; explained by anything statutory, and that everything in it is explained by the inspiring power of that death in which Christ made all our responsibilities to the law His own. There is a sense, of course, in which the law is Jewish, but St. Paul had generalized it in order to be able to preach the Gospel to the ; he had found analogues of it in every society and in every conscience; in his evangelistic preaching he defined all sin by relation to it; in the utmost extent of meaning that could be given to the term, ‘law’ had significance for all men; and it was a gospel for all men that St. Paul preached when he declared that Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming curse for us. No doubt when he wrote the words, ‘Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming curse for us,’ he was thinking, as his antecedents and circumstances compelled him to think, of himself and his fellow-countrymen, who had known so well the yoke of bondage; that is, it is an exegetical result that ἡμᾶς means us Jews; but that does not alter the fact that the universal gospel underlies the expression, and is conveyed by it; it only means that here a definite application is made of that gospel in a relevant case.

The same considerations dispose of the attempts that are made to evacuate the ‘curse’ of meaning by identifying it with the ‘Cross.’ No doubt Paul appeals in support of his idea that Christ became a curse for us to the text in Deuteronomy 21:23, which he quotes in the form ‘Cursed is everyone who hangs upon a tree.’ No doubt he avoids applying to Christ the precise words of the text, Accursed of God (κεκατηραμένος ὑπὸ τοῦ θεοῦ (LXX.) קּלְלַת־ אלהִים). So do we, because the words would be false and misleading. Christ hung on the tree in obedience to the Father’s will, fulfilling the purpose of the Father’s love, doing a work with which the Father was well pleased, and on account of which the Father highly exalted Him; hence to describe Him as accursed of God would be absurd. It is not because St. Paul shrinks from his own logic that he says He became a curse for us, instead of saying He became a curse of God, or accursed of God, for us; it is because he is speaking in truth and soberness. Death is the curse of the law. It is the experience in which the final repulsion of evil by God is decisively expressed; and Christ died. In His death everything was made His that sin had made ours — everything in sin except its sinfulness. There is no essential significance in the crucifixion, as if it would have been impossible to say that Christ became a curse for us, if He had died in any other way. The curse, in truth, is only one of St. Paul’s synonyms for the death of Christ — one which is relative, no doubt, to the conception of Christ as ‘under the law,’ but which for its meaning is entirely independent of the passage in Deuteronomy. The New Testament has many analogies to this use of the Old. Christ rode into Jerusalem on an ass, and declared Himself a King in doing so, but no one supposes that His is constituted or exhausted in this; it is entirely independent of it, though in connection with a certain prophecy (Zechariah 9:9) it can be identified with it. So again He was crucified between two thieves, and an evangelist says that there the Scripture was fulfilled — He was numbered with ; but we know that the Scripture was fulfilled in another and profounder sense, and would have been fulfilled all the same though Jesus had been crucified alone (Mark 15:28 Rec., Luke 22:37). And so also with the Deuteronomic quotation in Galatians 3:13. The Old Testament here gave Paul an expression — an argumentum, if we will; it did not give him his gospel. He had said already, e.g. in 2 Corinthians 5:21, and will say again in other forms, all he has to say here, that in His death Christ was made under the law, not merely as that which laid its imperative, but as that which laid its sentence, upon man; that He took to Himself in His death our responsibility, our doom, our curse, as sinful men, and not merely our obligation to be good men. And though it is Christian, it is not illogical, to avoid such an expression as accursed of God. For in so making the doom of men His own in death Christ was doing God’s will.

The other passages in Galatians which deal with our subject bring to view the ethical rather than the theological import of the death of Christ. One occurs at chapter 5:24: ‘They that are of Christ Jesus crucified the flesh with its passions and lusts. ’ Ideally, we must understand, this crucifixion of the flesh is involved in Christ’s crucifixion; really, it is effected by it. Whoever sees into the secret of Calvary — whoever is initiated into the mystery of that great death — is conscious that the doom of sin is in it; to take it as real, and to stand in any real relation to it, is death to the flesh with its passions and desires. So with the last passage in the epistle at which the subject recurs (6:14): ‘Never be it mine to boast but in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.’ Here the apostle reiterates with new emphasis at the end of his letter what he has enforced from the beginning, that the Cross is the explanation of everything Christian. Of course it is the Cross interpreted as he has interpreted it; apart from this interpretation, which shows it to be full of a meaning that appeals irresistibly to man, it can have no rational or moral influence at all. But with this interpretation it is the annihilative and the creative power in Christianity; the first commandment of the new religion is that we shall have no God but Him, who is fully and finally revealed there.

(4.) The Epistle to the Romans is not so directly controversial as that to the Galatians; there are no personal references in it and no temper. But the Gospel is defined in it in relation to law, in very much the same sense as in Galatians; the completeness of the Christian religion, its self-containedness, its self-sufficiency, the impossibility of combining it with or supplementing it from anything else, are assumed or proved in much the same way. The question of religion for St. Paul is, How shall a man, a sinful man, be righteous with God? The Gospel brings the answer to that question. It is because it does so that it is a Gospel. It tells sinful men of a righteousness which is exactly what they need. It preaches something on the ground of which, sinners as they are, God the Judge of all can receive them — a righteousness of God, St. Paul calls it, naming it after Him who is its source, and at the same time characterizing it as divinely perfect and adequate — a righteousness of God which is somehow identified with Jesus Christ (3 22; cf. 1 Corinthians 1:30). In particular it is identified somehow with Jesus Christ in His death (3:25), and therefore in Romans as in Galatians this death of Christ is the source of all that is Christian. All Christian inferences about God are deduced from it. Once we are sure of it and of its meaning, we can afford a great deal of ignorance in detail. We know that it covers everything and guarantees everything in which we are vitally interested; that it disposes of the past, creates the future, is a security for immortal life and glory (5:9 ff. and 8:31 ff.). What, then, does St. Paul say of the righteousness of God, and of the death of Christ in relation to it?

The critical passage is that in ch. 3 21 ff. To give a detailed exegesis of it would be to do what has been perhaps too often done already, and would raise questions to distract; as well as to aid intelligence. As is well known, there are two principal difficulties in the passage. The one is the meaning of ἱλαστήριον () in 5:25. The other is that which is raised by the question whether the righteousness of God has the same meaning throughout, or whether it may not have in one place — say in 5:22 — the half-technical sense which belongs to it as a summary of St. Paul’s gospel; and in another — say in 5:26 — the larger and more general sense which might belong to it elsewhere in Scripture as a synonym for God’s character, or at least for one of His essential attributes. Not that these two principal difficulties are unrelated to each other, on the contrary, they are inextricably intertwined, and cannot be discussed apart. It is an argument for distinguishing two senses of δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ (the righteousness of God) that when we do so we are enabled to see more clearly the meaning of ἱλαστήριος. It is the very function of Jesus Christ, set forth by God as a propitiation in His blood, to exhibit these two senses (which are equally indispensable, if there is to be a religion for sinful men), in their unity and consistency with each other. And, on the other hand, the term ἱλαστήριος, to say the least, is relative to some problem created by sin for a God who would justify sinners; and the distinction of two senses in which δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ is used enables us to state this problem in a definite form.

Assuming, then, that both difficulties will come up for consideration, there is a certain convenience in starting with the second — that which is involved in the use of the expression ‘the righteousness of God.’ It is used in vv. 21, 22, 25, and 26; and the use of it is implied in 3:24: ‘being justified freely by His grace.’ It seems to me a strong argument for the double sense of this expression that when the apostle brings his argument to a climax the two senses have sifted themselves out, so to speak, and stand distinctly, side by side, the end of all God’s action in His redeeming revelation of Himself to men is that He may be just Himself, and justify him who believes in Jesus’ (εἰς τὸ εἶναι αὐτὸ δίκαιον καὶ δικαιοῦντα τὸν ἐκ πίστεως Ἰησοῦ., 3:26). The first part of this end — God’s being righteous Himself — might quite fairly be spoken of as δικαιοσύνη (God’s righteousness); it is, indeed, what under ordinary circumstances is meant by the words. Compare, for example, the use of them in ch. 3: 5. But God’s appearance in the character of ὁ δικαιῶν (he who justifies) is also the manifestation of a righteousness of God, and indeed of the righteousness of God in the sense in which it constitutes St. Paul’s gospel — a righteousness of God which stands or turns to the good of the believing sinner. Both things are there: a righteousness which comes from God and is the hope of the sinful, and God’s own righteousness, or His character in its self-consistency and inviolability. In virtue of the first, God is ὁ δικαιῶν, the Justifier; in virtue of the second, He is δίκαιος, Just. What St. Paul is concerned to bring out, and what by means of the conception of Christ in His blood as ἱλαστήριος(endued with propitiatory power) he does bring out, is precisely the fact that both things are there, and there in harmony with each other. There can be no gospel unless there is such a thing as a righteousness of God for the ungodly. But just as little can there be any gospel unless the integrity of God’s character be maintained. The problem of the sinful world, the problem of all religion, the problem of God in dealing with a sinful race, is how to unite these two things. The Christian answer to the problem is given by St. Paul in the words: ‘Jesus Christ whom God set forth a propitiation (or, in propitiatory power) in His blood.’ In Jesus Christ so set forth there is the manifestation of God’s righteousness in the two senses, or, if we prefer it, in the complex sense, just referred to. Something is done which enables God to justify the ungodly who believe in Jesus, and at the same time to appear signally and conspicuously a righteous God. What this something is we have still to consider; but meanwhile it should be noted that this interpretation of the passage agrees with what we have already seen — that justification of the ungodly, or forgiveness of sins, or redemption, or whatever we are to call it, is a real problem for St. Paul. Gospel is the last thing in the world to be taken for granted: before there can be any such thing a problem of tremendous difficulty has to be solved, and according to the apostle of the Gentiles it has received at God’s hands a tremendous solution.

Before entering into this, it is only fair to refer to the interpretations of the passage which aim at giving the righteousness of God precisely the same force all through. In this case, of course, it is the technical, specifically Pauline sense which is preferred; the δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ is to be read always as that by which sinful man is justified. This is done by different interpreters with very various degrees of insight.

(1) There are those who seem unconscious that there is any problem, any moral problem, in the situation at all. The righteousness of God, they argue, is essentially self-imparting; it ‘goes out’ and energizes in the world; it takes hold of human lives and fills them with itself; it acts on the analogy of a physical force, like light or heat, diffusing itself and radiating in every direction, indiscriminately and without limit. Legal religion, no doubt, conceives of it otherwise; to , God’s righteousness is a negative attribute, something in which God, as it were, stands on the defensive, maintaining His integrity against the sin of the world; but that is only a mistake. God’s righteousness is effluent, overflowing, the source of all the goodness in the world; and we see in Jesus Christ that this is so. The truth in all this is as obvious as the irrelevance. Of course all goodness is of God; no man would less have wished to question this than St. Paul. But St. Paul felt that the sin of the world made a difference to God; it was a sin against His righteousness, and His righteousness had to be vindicated against it; it could not ignore it, and go on simpliciter ‘justifying’ men as if nothing had happened. Such an interpretation of the passage ignores altogether the problem which the sin of the world (as St. Paul looked at it) presented to God. It makes no attempt whatever to define the relation, on which everything in the passage turns, between the divine righteousness and the death of Christ as a ἱλαστήριον; and in missing altogether the problem, it misses as completely the solution — that is, it misses the Gospel. We cannot keep Christianity, or any specifically Christian truth, if we deny its premises, nor can we either state or solve a moral problem if we confine ourselves to physical categories.