“Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”—Romans v. 1.
In the Collect for today, the belief that Christ rose for our justification is made the ground for a prayer that we may put away malice and wickedness and serve God in pureness of living and truth. In my text, the same belief is said to be the ground of peace. Are we not tempted to think that the doctrine of justification by faith has actually made men careless about wickedness, and has bred wars rather than peace? These suspicions deserve serious examination. I begin with the last. I am convinced that wars, within and without, in individuals and nations, have indeed been connected with this faith. I do not see how it could have been otherwise, nor do I wish it had been otherwise; I cannot see how the peace the Apostle speaks of could have been won any other way.
Suppose a superior Being sent men this message: “I will surround you with every possible pleasure and remove every possible pain while you sojourn on earth.” Would this be the message of peace man needs? No—for man has proved, by long experiment, that he can turn felicities into curses for himself, and that if left to himself he will do so. The history of the world, especially of those lands where nature has been most generous, is little else than a demonstration of this. We might imagine that where there was nothing to spur exertion, man could at least fully enjoy mere physical existence. But it is not so. A man sunk into a beast cannot even have the beast’s ease, any more than its innocence. In his lowest depth some dim consciousness of something higher keeps him restless; the animals he cannot tame become his oppressors, and some of his own race, having kept their strength, enslave the rest. Deliverance from present pain, an overflow of present pleasure, was known even to the ancients to be no security of peace—not even its temporary gift.
What if the immediate gift becomes a promise instead—if deliverance from sorrow lies only in the future? No doubt teaching a man to look forward does him real good, raising him above a mere animal. So it is no wonder people have praised the benefit of expecting another life, of hoping for its blessings, of the providence a man learns when taught how to escape some distant evil. There is no exaggeration possible in such claims. But there may be fatal omissions that turn the promise into something worse than mockery. The argument for a future state, as Butler showed so well, rests on our sense that whatever is, continues, unless proved otherwise; and there is no proof that death interrupts existence. If not, belief in this life implies belief in another. But what continues? It is I—the same self that death cannot dissolve, who remains when everything about me is destroyed. What use is it to tell me of future bliss or misery, if my own heart tells me I shall be the same self, still capable of making a hell of heaven or a heaven of hell? A futurity of bliss or misery brings me no peace unless you first tell me something about myself now—unless you can show me how I may escape a perpetual war within. And that message must be a present one, not merely something to come. Providence against future evils may be desirable, but what good is it if I myself am the great evil I need delivering from? Hope may be the noblest possession—but what can I hope for, if my own being is my continual torment?
Perhaps these questions seem mere abstractions to you. I believe I am bringing them to the very point where they become practical—where they cease to be playthings for logicians and become mighty forces in the hearts of individuals and the destinies of nations. We speak of the glorious Reformation of the sixteenth century. Do we know that it began and grew into a fact of European history because a poor solitary monk was taught that he himself was the cause of all his anguish, and that no message from God or man could bring him peace unless it told him how to be delivered from the burden of himself? This monk learned in his cell that no grant of present or future felicity, no remission of penalties, could avail him anything unless he were raised to new ground—unless there were clear, authentic testimony he could not deny: “Thou art a right and true man; God accounts thee so; it is no delusion; it is certain.”
Luther had done fewer of what are called evil acts than most men, yet found no comfort in that. He had tried to do more good acts than most—but were they good? Did they spring from a good root, or from a very evil one—contrivances to escape the wrath of a Being he disliked, from whom he was fleeing, whom he wished did not exist? Then the old words of his childhood—that God is the forgiver of sins, the justifier, who sent His Son to reconcile man to Himself—struck him with a revelation of the proud, dark self-will that had turned a God of Mercy into a Devil in his mind. And he found in this Epistle to the Romans that St. Paul, fifteen centuries before, brought up at the feet of Gamaliel, had passed through the same struggle: that in himself dwelt no good thing; that he had cried, “Who shall deliver me from this body of death?”; that he had received Christ’s resurrection as testimony that God had justified him and did not impute his trespasses to him; that this faith had made him another man, able to trust and love God instead of hating Him; that it had made him know he really was what God declared him—righteous in God’s righteousness, able to rise above his own contentious, hateful self, and to claim the humble true life that is in Christ Jesus. What Paul had done, Luther could do: believe God was what He declared Himself to be, cease fighting Him, abandon the lie that enslaved him, and lay hold of the truth that set him free.
This was for himself. But then he heard of a man going about Germany selling indulgences for past, present, and future sins. It was not chiefly that the man’s language was brutal and blasphemous—that was only fitting to the doctrine—nor even chiefly that he sold indulgences for money, proof though that was that he and his masters worshipped Mammon rather than God. The whole horror, to Luther, was that the man preached indulgence and not forgiveness: removal of the penalty of deeds, not deliverance from the sin at their root; ease for the sinner, not his justification, not his being made truly righteous. It was the Gospel that there is real deliverance from sin, from selfishness, from distrust and hatred of God, and a real righteousness men may put on instead of the false self-righteousness that is only another name for untruth and hatred—it was this Gospel that went through Europe, subduing multitudes of suffering hearts, shaking thrones that stood not on righteousness, and producing all the good effects of the Reformation—effects distinct from the intrigues of princes, the greed of nobles, the arrogance of doctors, and the bitterness of sects. These latter did infuse themselves into it and introduce a new kind of war, as contrary to peace with God as to peace among men, because they aimed at a false, artificial peace, substituting another doctrine for the one in my text.
That text seemed to Luther and his hearers the announcement of the one fact a human conscience most needed. “Being justified by faith we have peace with God” expressed, they said, all that sinful creatures most needed to understand. If that view was too narrow, it was still far truer than the moderate, qualified views sometimes put in its place. It is a sign of weakness, I suspect, rather than breadth, to treat with contempt even the most vehement language our forefathers used on this subject. For the principle by which a man is at peace with his Creator, and therefore with himself, is certainly declared here if anywhere. It is worth examining each word closely, to see what it must have said to others, and what it says to us.
I. The common meaning given to “justified” may not be all St. Paul intended, nor all we need see in it—but it has great worth, and no one has a right to set it aside until he has fully searched it out; nor, having searched it, will he want to go deeper until he has grasped what lies on the surface. By justified, people understand acquitted. I would not fault such an explanation as merely forensic here. Legal language is right for you to use, to a great extent; members of a profession should not rashly discard its tools, but should treat them as aids to moral and spiritual education, always finding the passage—there always is one—from professional formulas to human truth. The error of divines, I think, has been in not adhering as strictly as St. Paul does to the true idea of acquittal. St. Paul never forgets—nor, I think, did Luther, whatever terms he used—that a man is acquitted of a charge, not of a penalty. By staying true to the legal sense of the word, the Apostle stays true also to its moral sense. It is the burden of an accusing conscience, the guilt resting on the man himself, from which he craves to be justified. St. Paul says God does justify him from this—does not impute sin to him. But how can this be, given Paul’s insistence, against the Jew, that all God’s judgments are true, with no respect of persons, no fiction? If a man is a sinner and feels himself one, how can it be true to pronounce him not a sinner? St. Paul resolves this paradox, having first found the answer as it bore on his own being: “In me, that is in my flesh, dwells no good thing. I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me. I feel myself a sinner, for I am utterly a sinner apart from Him in whom all righteousness dwells. God accounts me righteous, for He does not look on me apart from Him in whom He created me; He does not view me in the false way I view myself. He does not treat me as what, in my proper state united to Christ, I am not; He treats me as what, in that proper state, I am. He justifies me, and His judgment is according to truth: He holds me righteous because He has made me so.” I have not departed from the ordinary force of the word—I have vindicated it. But I have also claimed for it its natural, etymological sense: the justified man is not only acquitted, not only accounted righteous, but, strictly, made or become righteous.
So we feel the force of the next words, “being justified by faith.” St. Paul has spoken throughout his epistle of God as the just and righteous Justifier—this is the characteristic language of the whole letter, without which its statements become incoherent. But because God is the Justifier, who accounts and makes man righteous, a man is justified by faith. He believes God is such a Being as He has shown Himself to be, not as he had imagined—that God wills his righteousness and salvation, not, as he had thought, his destruction; that God’s righteousness is his protection, not the witness against him and ground of his curse; that what God curses is not himself but his enemy, the evil nature tempting him to think it his own. He believes this witness God has given in His Son, and so has faith in what God has done and is. Only by this faith is he justified from his sins—for losing it, he can only think of himself as a separate, accursed creature, and act accordingly. Only by it is he righteous, for only by it does he claim relation to the righteous One and rise out of his own nature. Having faith in God, he becomes a true man; otherwise he has only the torments of a man joined to the instincts of an animal.
Being justified by faith, we have peace. The nature of the blessing is understood through the process that leads to it. Peace is not something a man holds as his possession. The poor Augustinian monk kept trying to catch and keep it, and the harder he tried, the further it fled—every contrivance to procure it reminded him of himself, and himself was his enemy. When he forgot his misery, it was because he forgot himself. Where could he learn to forget himself perpetually? If that were possible, there might be peace. But could he lose self-consciousness except in death—and even in death, would it not rather mean losing the things that had diverted and soothed him, like the ocean nymphs who soothed Prometheus with their forms and songs, until he was left alone with only the vulture? No, peace in death he could not dream of; what he carried within him was death, and it was death he cried to be delivered from. Peace must come by rising into life. And here it was: being justified by faith, having his trust and life in another, the war was over because its cause was removed. He no longer struggled to make himself something he could not be, no longer twined ropes of sand at a demon’s bidding; he could stop thinking about himself and trust himself to God, stop plotting how to please Him, knowing self-willed effort never can please a Father, and that pleasing Him means compliance and submission—believing He is perfectly gracious, and asking Him to make us like Himself. To think this Peace is won by one momentary act of belief and thereafter guaranteed as the believer’s property is to subvert the whole doctrine.
No doubt the discovery that God is not an oppressor but a justifier can burst upon a man all at once, transporting him into unimagined joy. Shame at having doubted such love may mingle with that joy, deepening rather than lessening it. This union may rightly be called Conversion, a word both Romanist and Protestant divines have taken from the Bible. No greater revolution in a man’s inward life is conceivable than learning that the object of his greatest dread is his refuge and high tower. But such a Conversion means he has turned to a Friend from whom he was fleeing, has ceased boasting of any spiritual quality of his own, and has acknowledged that all human qualities are only reflections of one whose ground is in God and is perfectly shown in the Divine Mediator. If, then, under pretence of believing, he claims some possession that sets him apart from others, he denies the very meaning of faith and re-establishes the self-righteousness he claimed to abandon—and his life will testify to the delusion he practises on himself. All earnest teachers of Justification by faith have confessed that peace was theirs only when they gave up all thought of having acquired or earned anything; that they continually forgot the ground of their trust, sank back into self-will, and needed sharp reminders—sharp, yet still from a loving Parent—that they could have no other peace than what any man may have who finds God’s will to be good and ceases to fight it. The peace in the text, then, as needed in actual life, is peace with God. There is no abstract peace; it must be between parties with some natural relationship. Here it means the ending of hostility between parties unnaturally opposed. Peace with God means reconciling a man either with a Being who has cast him off, or with a Being he himself has cast off. Which of these it is, the whole Epistle to the Romans is written to explain. Man supposes God has cast him off and that he must win back favor; the Bible says man has cast off God, and God seeks to bring him into union with Himself. All other differences trace to this one. The deliverance from malice and wickedness we prayed for today is not the fruit of a faith that glorifies itself and leads us to despise unbelievers—more malice and wickedness have flowed from that self-glorifying faith than from any other source; it is the leaven of hypocrisy we most need to fear. Nor does the service of God in pureness flow from such faith; it is fatal to it. Precisely because God is pure and true, we cannot serve Him while nursing that faith—it makes us shrink from His purity, and makes us treat Christ as one who hides us from His Truth rather than as the Image of that Truth who brings us into it.
- So we come to the last words: “Through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Every man asks: How can I myself be at peace with God? Whatever is said of the world at large, he needs an answer that meets his own case, explains his own condition, and would hold even if he were alone in creation. It is a demand divines often dismiss as monstrous, throwing us back on generalities—but there is no escaping it. Each man stands out in awful distinctness and says, “I, even I, must stand before Eternity, before God; tell me how.” St. Paul’s answer is: God has made peace with you through Jesus Christ. In Him God has shown what He is; in Him God sees you. You may see God in Him; you may rise to be a new creature in Him. For you are not the separate atom you suppose, unrelated to any other being; you have wonderful affinities with all beings around you, and when driven by your own wretchedness to trust the One who has taken your nature upon Him, you will discover that secret as well as the secret of your own deliverance.
I have a right to say this, for we have not exhausted the Gospel of Christ merely by preaching this great doctrine of the individual conscience’s justification. There is a Catholic side of the Gospel as well as a Protestant one—a side concerning Society as well as one concerning each of us. We Englishmen must recognize both. The circumstances of this age demand we face the social question as much as the personal one. But we do no justice to one truth by letting go the other, nor strengthen one by weakening the other. We need both at full strength in our daily battles with ourselves, both that we may be freed from malice and wickedness, both that we may have full peace with God and with our fellow men, through our Lord Jesus Christ.