We need not deny that the Epistle to the Romans treats the doctrine of justification by faith, as every Protestant writer insists. Nor need we deny that it deals carefully with Law and the relation of Law to the Gospel. We will not skip the passages asserting the rights of the Gentiles, or those about Israel after the flesh and Israel according to promise. We will not make the letter explain St. Paul’s own life and struggles any less than the 7th chapter suggests, nor explain the state of the human race under its two heads any less than the 5th chapter suggests. Whatever aspect the Epistle has shown to any earnest reader, even the most superficial, should receive full recognition from anyone who understands that Christ was revealed in the Apostle so that he might preach Him. But when the various doctrinal and practical statements addressed to this Church are seen in that light, they are no longer fragments—not a random string of opinions and arguments, nor a dry formal treatise in which affection would be out of place. The whole becomes a Letter, with a clear and orderly sequence of thought, in which no part could be dropped without damaging the rest, flowing freely from a rich, inspired mind, perfectly fitted to the needs of the particular people addressed.
Those who make justification by faith the one subject of Romans can find some support in every chapter, but chapters 3 to 9 are their main ground. They tend to treat the first two chapters as prologue and everything after the 9th (or the 11th) as epilogue. On this arrangement they trace the argument clearly: chapter 3 shows all are guilty before God; chapter 4, that Abraham and David were forgiven and had righteousness imputed to them by faith under the old covenant; chapter 5, how this becomes available to us through Christ’s obedience; chapter 6, that faith without works has no evil moral consequences; chapter 7, how it frees the conscience from a terrible bondage; chapter 8, how it connects with hopes of future glory; chapter 9, how it rests on a divine election, not of the flesh but of the spirit.
This view seems plausible, but examined from various angles it raises many controversies. Does St. Paul really mean that all men without exception are sinners in the same sense—that the words “there is none righteous, no, not one,” their throats an open grave, asps’ poison on their lips, no fear of God before their eyes, apply to Samuel, Hezekiah, Isaiah? If not, where do you stop? The language sets no limits and gives no hint that it describes only the unfaithful; indeed the whole argument would collapse if it did.
Again, what faith is this that brought such blessings to David and Abraham? What kind and degree of it? Did it look to some event not yet done—was it future or present? If future, how does it resemble the faith that justifies after Christ’s coming? If present, what was present to them that is also present to their successors?
It is further asked whether the idea of imputed righteousness clashes with the Apostle’s solemn assertion that God’s judgments are according to truth, and with his condemnation of the Jews for treating righteousness as a mere form. Another question: doesn’t chapter 5 suggest that justification by Christ matched the fall in Adam, and was even more complete—yet how can that be if justification is only for the few who believe it? Then a moral difficulty: Paul says we must not stay in sin so that grace may abound, but if a man is not tempted to sin by having grace, is he not forced into sin by lacking it, and is that consequence not just as terrible? Again, if a man’s faith does not attract grace—which would be a Roman doctrine—in what sense is faith the justifying power? And once more, the endlessly repeated question: whom does chapter 7 describe—Paul converted or unconverted, a man aware of an evil nature without a deliverer, or aware of both and believing the deliverer stronger? Whom do the assurances of chapter 8 apply to—those God is willing to save in chapter 9? And are there not others, vessels of wrath, whom by the same chapter He is willing to destroy?
I think all these difficulties come from one source. It is assumed that Paul’s theology starts from human depravity, that he regards Christ and all Christ’s acts—I fear this sounds irreverent, but I cannot avoid it—as mere provisions against sin. This notion comes largely from taking Paul’s conversion as the key to his life and doctrine. I have no quarrel with that; I hold it firmly. But I must interpret his conversion as he interprets it. Then I have no reason to disturb the natural order of his Epistle, or to treat its opening—where he seems to announce his innermost purpose—as a mere porch.
Chapter I
St. Paul begins by saying he is entrusted with a gospel of God concerning His Son Jesus Christ, born of David’s line according to the flesh and declared to be the Son of God with power by the resurrection of His dead members. He is not ashamed of this Gospel, because it is the power of God unto salvation for everyone who believes. And why? Because in it the Righteousness of God is revealed to faith, as Habakkuk wrote: the righteous man shall live by faith. As this Gospel reveals God’s righteousness to everyone who believes, so also it reveals the wrath of God against those who hold down the truth in wrong. He explains this: God has shown Himself to all men, not just here and there; His power and Godhead are seen through His works; what can be known of Him He has declared to them.
Paul leaves no doubt what kind of showing this is. It is a showing of righteousness—of God as a righteous Being. He traces men’s unrighteousness in all its forms back to their unwillingness to keep God in their knowledge. In many ways they confess His righteousness and confess that He judges evil, yet they worship the creature more than the Creator and make Him into the likeness of birds and beasts and creeping things. And this idolatry, this revolt from the invisible God, drags after it an ever-growing train of moral corruptions.
Chapter II
So far his countrymen might agree, condemning the idolatrous world and boasting of their own privileges. But how dare they? Did mere possession of a law and covenant exempt them from other nations’ sins? Had not Jews committed every crime charged against the heathen? Was it not said that God’s Name was blasphemed among the heathen because of them? So how does the case stand? God had revealed Himself to the Gentile, and more fully to the Jew. Jews or Gentiles who, by patient well-doing, sought glory and honor and eternal life—that is, who truly made use of God’s self-revelation and chose to keep Him in their knowledge—would obtain what they sought; while Jews or Gentiles who were contentious and obeyed unrighteousness would find tribulation and wrath. How could such evil fall on a member of the chosen nation? Because the whole covenant is with the Jew inwardly; circumcision is not the outward thing in the flesh but the setting apart of the inner man to God, cutting him off from what is fleshly and outward.
Chapter III
So he asks in chapter 3 what advantage the Jew has, or what profit in circumcision. He answers: “Much every way. Chiefly because to them were committed the oracles of God.” God had revealed to them His own righteousness and His relation to them. And if some did not believe, should their unbelief cancel God’s faithfulness? No—let God be true though every man a liar. But this did not prove the Jew as Jew better than the Gentile as Gentile. In themselves, apart from God, all alike were under sin.
I submit that if we follow the Apostle in these statements, they determine the character of the rest of the Epistle.
The passage quoted from the Psalm need not be forced beyond the meaning it had for its original writer, as condemning a particularly godless age. Taken so, it serves Paul’s purpose. What the Law says, it says to those under the Law. How could such an indictment be brought against men who had the privilege of being Jews, if that very privilege made them righteous? That, he shows, can never be the effect of Law. By Law comes the knowledge of sin: it makes a man aware of something in him at war with a standard he admits he ought to keep. Such a statement presumes something prior to Law. The Law discovers evil in a man only by discovering God to him, and God as related to himself. It proclaims the dreadful fact that he inclines to be separated from One intimately bound to him, whom he cannot cast off. And Paul insists, with strict consistency, that the One of whom the Law testifies is a righteous Being—that the sense of sin would mean nothing otherwise. The notion that the Law reveals a Being of infinite power who has decreed the utmost penalty against a man never enters Paul’s mind, is not hinted at once. What he says is that a Being who is all right and true makes the man know there is something in him hostile to Right and Truth—awakening the sense not of punishment but of sin. Hence the conclusion: however that sense is awakened, by positive law or otherwise, the result is the same. Jew and Gentile stand alike guilty before God; condemnation belongs not to what makes them differ but to what makes them alike. The world is guilty before God.
Now comes justification. The sin was not wanting to keep the invisible, righteous God in one’s knowledge; God has made the man conscious of it; deliverance from it, the restoring of man to a right state, must be justification. How is it done? Paul declares that God has shown the Righteousness the law testified of but could not produce, in the Person of Jesus Christ. His Righteousness is shown in the forgiveness of sins, and this revelation is made to Faith. It is not the eye that recognizes God’s righteousness in Christ, nor the outward man that asks forgiveness. It is the inner self, conscious of estrangement, longing for reconciliation. To that God speaks, revealing His reconciliation and His righteousness in it. The man believes, is reconciled, becomes righteous—but has no ground to boast, for he did not make himself righteous or gain a righteousness of his own. He believed in God’s righteousness as seeking to make him righteous. God is just and the justifier. All the man’s righteousness comes from acknowledging God. And since God is not different for Jew and Gentile, the Gentile has as much right and duty to believe in Him. The revelation in Christ must justify both or neither.
Chapter IV
But one naturally asks: did Abraham’s circumcision do him no good, or was Abraham not in himself different from other men? Hear the Scripture. God reveals Himself to the uncircumcised Abraham; he believes; his faith is counted to him for righteousness. He becomes an actual heir and enjoyer of something not his own, of what is in another. His circumcision is a seal of that righteousness he had while still uncircumcised. His descendants had as much right to believe in the righteous God as he did, and here was a perpetual sign of their right. But the nature of the sign showed it was a right to believe, a spiritual privilege—not a right to think they had something of their own by descent, a fleshly privilege.
Abraham gained a righteousness not in himself by believing in a righteous God, and a power not in himself by believing in God’s power and promise. So he became the father of many nations, the father of the faithful, circumcised or not, all having a right to believe in One who revealed Himself as their Justifier. And how did God reveal Himself as Justifier of Jew and Gentile? By raising Jesus Christ from the dead—by delivering One out of what was the universal sign and curse of universal sin—by announcing Himself as the deliverer of man from death and sin.
Chapter V
You ask how Christ’s deliverance from death was man’s deliverance from death, and the assurance that sin was conquered for him? I can only answer: “Christ was revealed in St. Paul that he might preach Him among the Gentiles.” Paul found Christ to be the righteous ground of his own being, so that he might proclaim Him the righteous ground of Humanity. But for a fuller answer, Paul himself gives one.
The famous 5th chapter begins by declaring that, having been justified—not by anything we have done or that is in us or that sets us apart from our brethren—we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, access to a grace in which we stand, joy in the hope of God’s glory, and can welcome tribulations as breeding patience, experience, hope; and hope is upheld, and not put to shame, by the love of God poured into the heart. For that love was shown in Christ dying, not for the good or just, but for the ungodly. Its strength in the past pledges its strength in the future: if His death justified us, His life shall save us. Such words have often been used by a believer, or one who thinks he believes, to exalt himself above others: “I have this peace, this hope, this love, which you lack.” Paul cuts away that boasting while showing the real ground of confidence for those who will believe in God and not in their own belief. “As by the offence of one, judgment came upon all men to condemnation, even so by the righteousness of one, the free gift came upon all men unto justification.” The translation is careless and padded, but it keeps the great fact: justification is as wide as condemnation; if all shared one, all share the other. The translators trembled at their own admission, and in the next sentence evaded it by tampering with the original—a tampering Luther too is not clear of: “by one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one the many shall be made righteous.” If only some of the race shared Adam’s sin, then only some shared Christ’s justification. But Paul says all were involved in one, all included in the other. All in Adam’s race were shown by his sin to incline away from God and to have no righteousness in themselves; all in Christ’s race are shown to have a righteousness in Him, not their own, held only by faith. If we keep to the letter of the Epistle there is no retreating from this; explain it away as we like, there it stands in plain words. I would feel the same difficulty as anyone, and the same need to explain it away by fair means or foul, if I saw Christ’s death and resurrection as mere events at a late date, meant to remedy earlier evils. But since I see them as revelations of the Son of God in whom all things had stood from the first, in whom God looked on His creature Man from the first, I do not want to be rid of them; I thank God for them as the most blessed exposition of God’s order in the universe, of man’s disorder, and of how the one cures the other.
Chapter VI
Part of Paul’s statement might seem to make Christ’s grace only as wide as Adam’s fall. He guards against this: “Not as the offence, so also the free gift.” It was not one act of obedience against one act of disobedience, but against all the piled-up disobediences of mankind since creation. Where sin abounded, grace much more abounded. Such a forgiveness, deep and infinite, surmounting all offences, seems at first a warrant for presumptuous sin—and if justification meant merely removing punishment, the escape from fear of consequences, that would be a reasonable conclusion. Paul’s answer brings us to the most practical and most deeply metaphysical part of the letter: “Live in sin because we are delivered from sin? Live in that to which our great privilege is to be dead? Do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ were baptized into His death, buried with Him through baptism unto death, that as Christ was raised by the Father’s glory, so we should walk in newness of life?” What is more practical, more matching every human being’s experience in every land and religion, than that two powers struggle for him—one dragging him down into and below himself, one raising him out of and above himself? This conviction is the key to all mythologies and philosophies, binding them to each man’s conscience. What made Paul’s words to his Roman converts differ from what Pythagoras or Socrates might say to a disciple? Just this: “We know the good power raising us has claimed us as His own. Our baptism witnesses, not that we chose good and shunned evil, but that He who is good and true has chosen us and taken us into His service.” That is the main idea of the chapter: those who were servants of sin have been taken as servants of God, their right to that name established, their highest privilege to yield their members as instruments of righteousness. But the contrast of death and life expands this. “You are dead to sin: count yourselves so. You are alive to God: count yourselves so.” Both facts of humanity from the last chapter are now applied to the individual. Not only is there an Adam and a Christ as heads of the race; there is a Christ and an Adam head of thee. And the Christ has triumphed over the Adam: the Son of God in your nature has conquered your nature, slain it in Himself and raised it to new life in Himself. Now God claims each of you as His, a sharer of Christ’s death and life. Act as a child of Adam, with the Adam in you as master, and you are a sinner, whose wages is death. Act as though the Adam is dead and you are a new man married to Christ, and you gain His righteousness, bear fruit unto holiness, and reach the end, that eternal life which is knowing God and Jesus Christ.
Chapter VII
Christ and sin have been spoken of as two powers a man may obey. Claiming Christ, married to Him, the man dies to sin, and dying to sin he dies to the law that condemns sin; it no longer condemns him but condemns a state he disowns. He is married to Another, to Him risen from the dead, that he may bear fruit to God.
Then comes that wonderful history over which commentators have fought so much, in which suffering people find themselves explained—which they feel must be in one sense the story of a past experience Paul emerged from when the full light came, and in another sense the disclosure of what was always true of him and of all men in all times. The key is these words: “I was alive without the Law once; but the commandment having come, sin came into life, and I died.” This is the death sin causes, the instant death: “I died; I was shut up in self, unable to get beyond myself; so as a spirit I was dead. I strove to escape this prison, yearned after a higher state, felt I belonged to it, delighted in the law of God—yet could not obey it. Wretched man! How can I be delivered from this death? If I am still the same, what new circumstances can help me? If I am evil, what forgiveness can help me? But you are not evil; you are righteous; Christ is in you; you are one with Him. I thank God through Jesus Christ my Lord.” This is surely the record of a discovery made to the Apostle at a certain time—a truth good for all his later years, which he need not repeat, since God claimed him as a new creature in Christ, then and always. But that revelation brought another: “With my flesh I serve the law of sin.” Conversion and baptism do not change that; they declare it. In you, your separate self, they both say, dwells no good thing. Only while you claim the privilege of a spiritual creature—not shut up in self but married to a living Lord—are you righteous, are you alive.
Chapter VIII
The 8th chapter carries this out. “There is therefore no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath freed me from the law of sin and death.” These words, and the magnificent passage that follows, unfold more fully the truth working out through the whole Epistle: that man in the flesh, in himself, is hopelessly condemned, alienated from God, under a death that goes on by an unchangeable law; while man in the spirit, in Christ, is justified, redeemed, renewed, under a law of resurrection with ever-expanding glory. What is added here is that the spirit united to Christ raises up the body to share its risen freedom, just as the body had dragged the spirit down into subjection to visible things. Nor does this stop there. The Apostle sees the whole involuntary creation subjected to man’s bondage, and so assured of a share in his freedom. So little will he allow that any creature’s fallen state can ever become its true state, so deeply does it penetrate his theology that humanity can only be seen in Christ, that the law of the spirit of life in Him is the law of the universe. The passages at the chapter’s end about those God foreknew, predestinated, justified, called, glorified—which I would not evade but earnestly press on every reader to seek the fullest meaning of—must be read by Paul’s earlier language. If we forget what he said of spirit and flesh, and that both are in every man, and fail to confess that the spiritual man is the man, walking according to God’s constitution for human beings, all these words lose their force; we may seem to take them literally, but we shall find ourselves twisting the letter as much as we pervert the spirit. So when he ends with that song, “Who shall lay anything to the charge of God’s elect?” I think those hear it most faintly who are trying to secure for themselves the right to be God’s elect to the exclusion of others; while those hearts echo it most clearly which thank God that of His mercy He called them out of their natural pride and exclusiveness into the common blessings He has given their kind in Him who died and rose again for it, and gave them a glimpse of that infinite love which is above, over, through, and beneath all.
Chapter IX
The 9th chapter opens with the deep sorrow Paul felt at thinking of his nation as cast off by God. He felt an Israelite’s anguish, but more. The permanence of the nation is bound up with belief in God’s promises. If it ceases, God’s Word has failed; He who is, and was, and is to come, has changed His purpose. But that, Paul says, is impossible; Israel cannot cease. And is it new to distinguish Israelites from Israel? Is not the history full of men who seemed the natural heirs being rejected while the promise and the race continued? What do such cases mean? They are explained by the law of spirit and flesh. Israelites imagine they are such by descent from Abraham or Isaac. But were not Ishmael and Esau firstborn of Abraham and Isaac? What did their rejection show? Not any special wrongdoing—their exclusion was decided before they had done good or bad. Why? To show the race stood on higher ground than fleshly relationship, that it witnessed a spiritual relationship: God’s calling, not man’s begetting; sonship to Him, not to Abraham.
This idea runs through the whole chapter. Popular writers and learned commentators alike have inverted it. Instead of making the permanence lie in Israel’s preservation, they read Paul as saying: Israel may perish, but a few select Israelites, myself among them, will be saved—a comfort that would have overwhelmed rather than eased his grief, for then God’s Word had failed and the prophets’ promises gone unfulfilled. Secondly, and in line with this, they suppose the exclusion of Ishmael and Esau before they had done good or evil asserts God’s arbitrariness or self-will, which they call sovereignty. If so, all the Jewish conceit of privilege that Paul was fighting would be confirmed by the very instances he uses against it. But if Paul says to the Jew, “You cannot claim Jacob was chosen for being better than Esau, or Isaac than Ishmael; it was done to fulfil God’s purpose—the very purpose of this whole letter, to shame mere fleshly descent, which is partial and limited, and to assert the spiritual bond between God and man in Christ, Lord of man’s spirit, Son of God and Son of Man”—then he upholds his life’s great object and derives his right to be apostle to the Gentiles from the history of the Jews.
From false premises it has been natural to read the rest of the chapter as a bare assertion of sovereignty choosing some and rejecting others. And no doubt, if this passage has no connection with the rest of the letter—if the letter has not set forth God emphatically as the righteous Being making men righteous, said nothing of the justification of all by One’s obedience answering the condemnation of all by one’s disobedience, made no attempt to reconcile these by the Apostle’s own experience of a flesh in him with no good and a spirit hungering for righteousness, given no witness that God in Christ receives that spirit and will raise the body too—if we are to begin with “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy,” with no knowledge of who speaks or of whom, free to fill in our idea of God from some heathen Ammon or Jove—then certainly these words must give the impression readers have taken from them. But if the fundamental idea of God is the righteous Being, then to believe we get what we seek not by willing or running but by God’s mercy simply repeats what has been said: that man merely receives the good that comes from the Source of good. It tells us we do not work our way to heaven, but heaven comes down to receive and adopt us. And Paul’s answer to the recurring objection, “Who has resisted His will? Why does He still find fault?” does not dissolve everything into sovereignty and cancel the whole letter’s teaching; it asserts the consoling truth that a man submitting to the Ruler of the universe submits to a wholly gracious, loving, merciful will seeking to make him gracious and loving; while the man resisting and disputing it hardens himself, shuts himself in self-will, becomes proud and unloving—especially when, like those Paul argues with, he makes his religious privileges and election a ground for exalting himself above his brethren. Hence the special hardness the Jews were showing, which made them, as he says, “enemies to God and contrary to all men.” Pharaoh’s very pride was reappearing in the descendants of those delivered from Pharaoh. As God’s will had been shown through Pharaoh’s hardened heart, His power and grace displayed through disobedience, so it would be again, through the hardening of these Israelites.
This goes very deep. There is a divine will discovered at the root of all things. Our minds reel unless they fall prostrate before it. But if they do, they find what Paul teaches: it is a will of absolute righteousness and mercy, long-suffering to those who have resisted, gracious to those not asking for it. For the prophets taught Paul that God would show this mercy to a people who had not sought Him but whom He never forgot. He says in Hosea, “I will call that which is not my people, my people,” which does not annul but confirms Isaiah’s word that God would keep a remnant of Israel, that the nation in its truest, divinest sense should never perish. So far the result is: the Gentiles have obtained the righteousness that comes of faith, of believing in and yielding to God’s righteousness. A righteousness has been revealed which those who claim it in the only way a spiritual thing can be claimed become truly endued with. But Israelites, always aiming at a law of righteousness as their own property, boasting of it, have not obtained it, have become unrighteous and hard-hearted. Why? Because they did not believe in God’s righteousness as the ground of their own, but tried to make one by selfish acts. God laid a foundation for them to rest on, revealing His Son as the corner-stone of humanity: those who stumbled at that stone lose their place in the spiritual temple; those who confess it will not be confounded.
Chapter X
These words of Isaiah are deeply fixed in the Apostle’s mind; he returns to them in the next chapter, and their spirit runs through it. But he does not rely on them alone to support his great proposition: that the Jewish Scriptures throughout assert a righteousness lying at the foundation of things—which the law did not create but rests on, which men’s works do not create but rest on, and which belongs to Gentile as much as Jew. Moses, he says, clearly distinguished the righteousness that consists in keeping precepts: “he that doeth these things shall live in it.” On the other hand he describes the righteousness that is faith’s object: “Say not, Who shall go up into heaven? or, Who shall go down into the deep? The word is nigh thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart.” A wonderful passage, throwing clear light on all Paul has said. The righteousness a man believes in is not far off in some heaven or down in some abyss; it is close to him, with him. He stands on it; his faith confesses it as the ground of his existence. So Moses spoke, and in speaking, Paul says, he spoke of Christ, of Him who is the ground of the righteousness that the law outwardly expresses. Yet the longing to climb to heaven and go into the deep was a natural human desire felt by all nations—all asking what that firmament above means for man, how he can claim his rights there; all asking what the deep below is, the grave into which the body descends, the dark infinite proclaiming itself the beginning and end of all things. Here the facts of the Gospel meet its principle. Christ has descended into the grave and hell, Christ has ascended into heaven. The Lord your righteousness, the Divine Word, Son of God and Son of Man, has entered the regions you longed to enter, knows them all, claimed them all as His Father’s. Believing in Him, you may be freed from the restlessness Moses knew his people and all people would feel.
I know that in the next sentence the “word” is rhēma, not logos. The word of faith Paul preached was: “If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you shall be saved.” There was to be an open proclamation to the whole world that this Man is the Lord of men. If that word were choked and suppressed, a man would not believe Jesus is his Lord. But with it must go belief in the heart that God raised Him from the dead—that this Lord conquered death—otherwise there is no salvation from the fear of death, from man’s great enemy. “For with the heart there is belief unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession unto salvation.” Within, man believes in his righteous King and Deliverer and so becomes righteous; with his mouth he joins in confessing Him and so is fully set free. Here is revealed the mysterious law that we are members of one body: though becoming partaker of righteousness is wholly inward and spiritual, it cannot be a merely individual process; we can only be saved from our evil—so much of which is selfishness and isolation—by confessing a common Saviour and centre. Paul connects this with the equal privileges of Jew and Greek. Quoting Isaiah again, he lays the emphasis on “every one”: “every one that believeth in Him shall not be ashamed. For there is no difference between Jew and Greek; the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call on Him. For whosoever shall call on the Name of the Lord shall be saved.”
That there is a righteousness for all men, which they know of and revolt against, has been Paul’s theme from the start. Now he is driven back to the question raised at the outset: “How could the Gentiles call on One they had not heard of? How believe without a preacher? How preach unless one is sent?” He answers with Isaiah: “How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace and bring glad tidings of good things.” These words declared the Jews appointed as heralds of blessing to the earth. Yet most did not heed the message, for Isaiah says, “Lord, who hath believed our report?”—showing there is a hearing that precedes faith, as there is a report of Christ that is the ground of hearing. But had there not been a hearing and a report that might have grounded faith? What of the 19th Psalm: “Their voice has gone out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world”? Whether Jews preached or not, sun, moon, and stars had been preaching to all men everywhere. “What—preaching of Christ?” some learned theologian will exclaim. Yes, sir, preaching of Christ. Paul taught us so in chapter 1: God’s works were not declaring a designer or arguing to the understanding, but preaching to the common heart and conscience of mankind of a God to be obeyed, a God near them, against whom they rebelled when proud, sensual, covetous. They preached of a Lord of man, of his spirit—that Lord who in the fullness of time took flesh and dwelt among them. And were not Israelites told this in their Scriptures? Was it new that other nations might learn the truths the Jews were stewards of? How did they read Moses: “I will stir you to jealousy by that which is not a nation; by a foolish nation will I provoke you”? Did that not mean people outside the covenant were admitted to truths the Jews closed their hearts to? Or Isaiah’s bold saying: “I was found by those who did not seek me; I was made manifest to those who did not ask after me,” while to Israel he says, “All day long I have stretched out my hands to a disobedient and contradictory people.”
Chapter XI
So the question returns that so distressed the Apostle: “Has God cast away His people?” “That cannot be,” is the answer, “for I am an Israelite, of Abraham’s seed, of the tribe of Benjamin.” How is that an answer? A poor one indeed if Paul thought, as many interpreters do, that his salvation was exceptional—a blessing on the individual Saul because it pleased God’s sovereignty to spare him from the doom the race, by the same sovereignty, was consigned to. Taking “people” in the ordinary sense, Paul could not represent the people, and his preservation would prove nothing about God’s faithfulness to them. But if Israel was called out to represent the true state of man, to declare man’s relation to God as spiritual and not carnal, then anyone who stood on that spiritual relation, repudiated the carnal ground of confidence, and preached to Gentiles as well as Jews that they are spiritually related to God—such a person is not a fragment rescued from a rejected race; he embodies the very principle and purpose of the race. Though he were alone, the nation would survive in him. But Paul has no proud thought of being alone. He recalls Elijah, who thought himself the last worshipper of God while all bowed to the Baal of Phoenicia, and was told there were 7,000 in Ahab’s land, where there was no temple-worship, still trusting the Lord God of their fathers.
“Even so,” he says, “there is a remnant according to the election of grace”—a remnant in Isaiah’s and the prophets’ sense, not the modern predestinarian’s; a remnant witnessing that the root of the nation has not perished, that the substance of the oak remains though branches are gone, not one proving that most branches were lopped off and a few kept by arbitrary decree. Paul presses his old doctrine: how was this remnant kept? By the grace of God, from whom all good in His creatures comes, not by any works of theirs. He need not restate this against the unbelieving Jew, already confuted: it had been shown he could claim election or superiority only by God’s calling, and that when he boasted himself better than the Gentile, he chose a test that must condemn him. But it was very necessary for the Church—the Gentile part as well as the Jewish—that this be driven home. Surely the same lying thought would arise in the Church, “In ourselves, by our acts or covenant, we are better than others,” and bear worse fruit than before. So Paul lays the axe to the root: he shows the Gentiles the meaning, cause, and conditions of the Jewish rejection, that they may see the same could befall them. How stands the case? Israel after the flesh, standing on fleshly privileges, sought something and did not find it; but the election, standing on spiritual ground, obtained what they sought. The rest were hardened—those to whom Isaiah’s words apply: God gave them a spirit of slumber, eyes that do not see, ears that do not hear. A fearful sentence, the most fearful that can befall a man or nation, but one that shows there is something to see and hear. They are in the light, or their blindness would mean nothing; a voice speaks to them, or you could not call them deaf. Every charge against the Jews assumes ignorance of a state that was really theirs—ignorance brought on by wilful struggle against a divine Teacher seeking to make them know themselves and Him. Every dreadful curse, like the one Paul quotes from the 109th Psalm, falls on a race of proud, self-righteous, self-seeking men who have grown brutal and cruel because they broke loose from a merciful Ruler, and must learn what it is to be left prowling in the darkness they chose.
“They have stumbled,” Paul continues. “But is it so that they should fall?” He boldly answers, “By no means.” Then he argues from the truth he has asserted so often: neither Jews nor Gentiles were holy in themselves, but only because the root is holy; the Jew cannot boast against the Gentile, still less the Gentile against the Jew; each lives only while it abides by faith in the root, and each, not abiding, may be cut off. On the other hand, the root has a life and sap that can restore what is decayed. Israel, not abiding in the root, claiming independent virtue, was cut off; the same cause will produce the same effect in any nation. But let the Gentiles receive this mystery, however hard: blindness has come to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has entered in, and so all Israel shall be saved, as it is written, “There shall come a Deliverer out of Zion, and shall turn away iniquities from Jacob.” Mercy to the Gentiles thus becomes the final cause of the Jewish fall, so that the same mercy may reach the Gentiles too; for “God has shut them all up in unbelief, that He may have mercy on all.” I can give no interpretation of these words; I leave them to interpret themselves to the reader. Paul did not claim to understand them himself, but he knew they were true, and could realize their truth when he cried, “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God.” He did not try to sound a love he found unfathomable; he was content to be lost in it.
Chapter XII
But that revelation of Mercy and Love, however deep, was no less the foundation of practical life. “I beseech you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living, holy, acceptable sacrifice to God, that reasonable service of yours; and not to be conformed to this world, but transformed by the renewing of the reason, that you may test what is that good, acceptable, perfect Will of God.” Rebellion against a perfect Will that has shown itself in acts of love to all creatures, its redeeming power over and through and in them, has been the misery of Jew and Gentile alike, the cause of the blindness that keeps both from discerning that Will. Simple submission, an entire surrender of self to God, is the reasonable sacrifice by which a man comes into his right state, claims his true relation, and gains the power to see what was hidden or inverted. Making that sacrifice, there would be no more self-exaltation and boasting of one above another, which destroys Christian fellowship. “For as we have many members in one body, but the members do not all have the same function, so we, the many, are one body in Christ, and each one members of one another.” This parable—the parable of parables, which explains the very nature of parable—of the intimate link between the individual’s constitution and society’s, each suggesting the other, is drawn out at greater length in the Epistle to the Corinthians. Here it bears especially on that renewing of the mind and deliverance from the form of this world he has just spoken of. Jews and Gentiles had each striven for superiority; Jewish pride trampled Gentile, Gentile pride rose against Jew. The discovery that they had nothing of their own, that they lived simply on God’s free, equal grace, given in measures to each for the good of all, showed the absurdity of pride; and offering themselves as sacrifices was the renunciation of it. The new order is founded on the manifestation of the God of righteousness and grace, carried out in the reconciliation God made for the race by giving His Son for all, and consummated when the Spirit of grace enables each man to live as a member of a body and give up himself. With that sacrifice begins the faithful doing of every assigned task, each man knowing what he is meant to be and cheerfully doing his own work as God’s work without intruding on his brother’s. Humility here is not an ornamental virtue but a necessary condition of one’s place in the commonwealth, and from it flow all other graces: zeal, hope, patience, prayer, hospitality, forgiveness of persecutors, sympathy, leaving vengeance to God, overcoming an enemy’s evil with good.
Chapter XIII
The 13th chapter opens with words familiar as texts for sermons on the duties of subjects to rulers, but which we do not usually connect with what surrounds them. That submission to the divine, gracious Will, that acknowledgment of the offices given to each member of the commonwealth, that breaking of the ambitious, self-exalting spirit, makes the precept, “Let every soul be subject to the higher powers, for there is no power but of God; the powers that be are ordained of God,” an assertion of a beautiful order running from highest to lowest through every rank—man being the one able to disobey and having the privilege of cheerful, voluntary obedience. On this ground some have argued that the powers meant are ecclesiastical, not civil rulers: “Only in a Church organized on the apostolical idea could there be the spiritual authority and subjection here enjoined. To call Nero’s power spiritual or divine is monstrous; it might be submitted to from conscience as an appointed scourge, but never confessed an ordinance of God.”
This is plausible but, I think, mistaken. The common view, though dry and often defended on false grounds, is nearer Paul’s mind. Drawing his idea of authority from the Church, not the Empire—seeing the Empire as the distortion of the principle the Church displayed—he had to affirm that all power whatsoever is ordained of God, precisely in order to protest against all arbitrary use of power, all claim of a man to be absolute, as hateful and ungodly. He could not limit the principle to the Church without destroying the Church’s claim to declare the true principle of all human society.
So here, as elsewhere, there is a special fitness in his words to the Church he addresses, and this application shows how all his earlier teaching on Righteousness and Law bore on the state of the Roman world as well as the Roman Church. The rest of the chapter, where he presents Love as the fulfilling of Law, shows how his teaching on gospel and law bears on society as well as on individuals. The gospel of God’s love and reconciliation becomes the power of God that saves a man or a society from self-will and enables both to bear fruit to God, the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus purifying and uniting the spirits in whom He dwells. This Spirit of love is calling men’s spirits out of the sleep of death, bidding them wake, because the night is far spent and Christ’s day is at hand—a day that must scatter all confused images and night-birds and show how near Christ is and always has been. To see Him is our salvation from the darkness of the world and of our nature; every hour we believe and trust Him brings His full disclosure nearer. So let us act as if the day were already here, doing no deeds of darkness but putting on the armor of light.
Chapter XIV
None of these principles apply to individuals alone. They are all social precepts, and because they are, they bear most sharply on the conscience of each member of a society. Waking out of sleep is surely addressed to a man’s conscience—but to the conscience of a man who sees he has not followed the law of love, has lived apart from his brethren, lived to himself. This law of love is now applied to obviously social questions—about meats and drinks—over which a Church of Jews and Gentiles, with all their local, philosophical, and religious divisions, was bound to quarrel. Paul refuses to settle them. Had he settled them, there would be no room for the principle by which alone they could really be settled. As long as any man believed he could judge his neighbor in these things, the idea of a common Master and Spirit stayed weak. The truth on which the Church stands had to be imperfectly recognized in order for such rules to be dogmatically laid down—but such rules are worthless except as grounded on the law of love and self-sacrifice. All allowances and self-restraints that interfere with that are equally ungodly, and each man’s conscience will avenge itself on him if he trifles with another’s. A man must take care not to condemn himself in what he allows himself. These practical ethics still rest on the great sacrifice Paul keeps returning to: “Christ pleased not Himself; for as it is written, The reproaches of them that reproached Thee fell on me.”
Chapters XV. and XVI
This use of a Psalm’s words might strike some readers as unnatural. Did they not belong to a Jew, written long ago? What have they to do with Gentiles or the Christian Church? Consistent with all he has said, the Apostle claims these Scriptures, with their history and revelation, as belonging to Gentile no less than Jew. Christ came as minister of the circumcision to confirm the promises to the fathers, and came to declare the Gospel to the Gentiles; as the center of past, present, and future, the foundation stone of both, the common root of blessing to both, all these words meet in Him; and the God of consolation and hope was using them, and would use them more and more, to establish the patience, faith, hope, and unity of the whole body.
The Apostle goes on to speak of his hope of seeing his Roman brethren, whom he had never met, and his resolve to visit them after Jerusalem, before going to Spain. He was sure he would come to them in the fullness of the blessing of the Gospel of peace. A plan strangely defeated, an assurance wonderfully fulfilled. Before reaching Rome he would be mobbed and beaten at Jerusalem, held under two successive governors at Caesarea, and brought after shipwreck before Nero. Yet the prisoner did come in the fullness of the Gospel of peace, which spread more widely from his prison, through all churches and times, than when he spoke freely. This simple statement of a purpose to be frustrated as he conceived it, yet realized in a better and diviner way, has the same effect as the greetings in the last chapter. Both keep us aware that we are reading the actual letter of an actual man, full of personal sympathies, hopes, sorrows, and joys—who often saw only a little way into his own future and may often have been deceived in others—while we are forced to confess that he has disclosed to us the mystery of the divine purpose, the ground on which our right and wrong, our thoughts, acts, and hopes rest, as no man could who had not a right to say he was the Apostle of God Himself, entrusted with a Gospel for man.