St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans: A Practical Exposition. Vol. II

Naturally, as faith is thus the characteristic of Christianity, and this faith in a person involves a belief about Him – His divine sonship, His resurrection, His mission of the Spirit – so 'the faith' comes to mean (objectively) that which the Christian believes, or his creed; and this sense of the word appears almost in the Acts, in Gal. i. 23, and in Eph. iv. 5, and certainly in the Pastoral Epistles frequently (see Dr. Bernard in Camb. Gr. Test. on 1 Tim. i. 19) and St. Jude's Epistle, verse 2.

NOTE B. See vol. i. p. 103

THE USE OF THE WORD 'CONSCIENCE.'

There is no word for conscience in the Old Testament. 'The conception,' says Delitzsch (Bibl. Psychology, Clark's trans., p. 160), 'is not yet impressed upon it.' And he accounts for this by quoting, 'The positive law took away its significance from the natural moral consciousness.' The Jews, that is – like other nations at certain stages of their history – lived so constantly under the detailed guidance of a law believed to be divine, that there was not much room for reflection as to the right and wrong of things. For the idea of conscience to develop, the will of God must be less clearly and decisively pronounced as to the details of conduct. There was, however, of course among the Jews, in proportion to their belief in a clear divine law, the consciousness of having done wrong; and on this account a man's 'heart' is described as 'privy to' an offence, and as 'reproaching' or 'smiting' him: see 1 Kings ii. 44, Job xxvii. 6227, 1 Sam. xxiv. 5, xxv. 31, 2 Sam. xxiv. 10. Here is the root of the idea of conscience, i.e. of something in the man behind his surface self, reflecting upon what he has done, a self behind himself acquitting or condemning him, and so anticipating the divine judgement. For, as stated above228, this was in the main the Stoic doctrine of conscience, and it was among them that the idea was first developed. Conscience was conceived of as that in man which lay behind his working self and reflected on his actions after they were done, bringing them into the light of the 'law of nature' or universal divine law for man. There is thus, as it were, in each man a double self, or double consciousness (conscientia), so that one can reflect upon himself, and pass judgement on his own actions.

It is in this sense of a self-judging faculty in all men reflecting on what they have done, anticipating a divine judgement, that the idea of conscience was acclimatized among the Jews. Thus, in Wisdom xvii. 11, we read, 'For wickedness, condemned by a witness within, is a coward thing, and being pressed hard by conscience, always forecasteth the worst lot.' In St. John viii. 9, according to one reading, the Jews are 'convicted by their own conscience.' So St. Paul, in the passage discussed above (ii. 15), seems to distinguish the subsequent reflective 'conscience' from the previous informing reason, 'the effect (equivalent) of the law written in their hearts.' And in most of the passages of the New Testament, this meaning of conscience – the faculty by which we sit in judgement on what we have already done – is sufficient. But sometimes, as also among the Stoics229, the word passes into meaning the positive directing faculty, as when (1 Cor. viii. 10) a man's 'conscience' is said to be 'emboldened' to adopt a new practice, or (Hebr. ix. 14) to be cleansed for positive service. Moreover, though it is an individual faculty (see Rom. ii. 15), and exists primarily to pass judgement on one's own actions only, yet perforce it must also look without and condemn or approve the actions of others (2 Cor. iv. 2, v. 11).

St. Paul also brings into notice that our conscience is a faculty for the condition of which we are responsible. It is not the voice of God, but a faculty capable of reflecting His voice, if it be well guarded. Thus you may have a 'weak' or a 'strong,' i.e. a more or less enlightened, conscience (1 Cor. viii). And a man may 'defile' his 'mind and conscience,' i.e. he may corrupt his moral reason and powers of moral self-judgement (Tit. i. 15). Then the 'conscience' may become hardened and 'seared' (1 Tim. iv. 2), so that 'the light that is in' men becomes itself 'darkness' according to our Lord's warning (St. Matt. vi. 23). And there is nothing which is more necessary at the present day than to remind men that they are not 'safe' because they are not acting against their conscience, unless they are also constantly at pains to enlighten their conscience and keep it in the light, by the help of the best moral thought of their time, the guidance of the Church and the word of God. Our conscience, if it is rightly to reassure us by its witness, must, like St. Paul's conscience, bear its witness 'in the Holy Ghost' (Rom. ix. 1).

With us moderns 'conscience' has generally the wider meaning of the whole practical moral consciousness. It enjoins as well as judges, and is occupied with the present and the future, as well as with the past.

NOTE C. See vol. i. p. 129

RECENT REACTIONS FROM THE TEACHING ABOUT HELL

There is no doubt that there has been within the last forty years a great, and in large measure legitimate, reaction from the old – mediaeval and Calvinist – teaching about hell. But one who reads the early chapters of the Epistle to the Romans, or the Gospels, or other parts of the New Testament, in view of this reaction, will probably feel an uncomfortable sense that it has gone too far. It is worth while then to try and discriminate.

To put the matter in as brief a summary as befits a note, I should hold that the reaction has been legitimate so far as it has involved a repudiation of —

(1) the Calvinist doctrine that God has created some men, no matter whether many or few, inevitably doomed to everlasting misery. This doctrine is flat contrary to some particular statements of the New Testament (as to its general spirit) and is only a misunderstanding of others (see above, pp. 8, 29).

(2) any such crude idea of the divine judgement as that God condemns men for merely external reasons, e.g. because in fact, apart from any question of will, they were not baptized, or remained pagans or heretics. Such a conception is quite inadequate, for the divine judgement penetrates to the heart. God is a father: He is absolutely equitable: He judges men in the light of their opportunities. He will reject none whose will is not set to evil. 'This is the judgement that … men loved the darkness rather than the light, for their works were evil' (John iii. 19).

(3) the tendency to exaggerate what is revealed to us, and what, therefore, we can say we know about the state of man after death. Thus (a) there is nothing really revealed to us as to the relative proportions of saved and lost. (b) It is certain that we only know of a probation for man here and now – 'Now is the accepted time – now is the day of salvation.' And the absolutely equitable Father may see the conditions of an adequate probation equally in every man's earthly lot. It is therefore foolish to entertain, or encourage any one else to entertain, an expectation of any other state of probation except that which we certainly have here in this world. 'It is appointed unto men once to die, and after that the judgement.' But if St. Peter could speak (as of a familiar subject) of the 'gospel' as having been 'preached' by our Lord's human spirit in Hades 'to the dead,' i.e. to those who had perished in their wickedness under the divine judgement of the flood: and preached with the intention that the judgement might be turned into a blessing and means of spiritual life– and he certainly does speak thus (1 Peter iv. 6, cf. iii. 19): I do not see how we can deny the possibility at any period, or in the case of any person, of an unfulfilled probation being accomplished beyond death. (c) Careful attention to the origin of the doctrine of the necessary immortality or indestructibility of each human soul, as stated for instance by Augustine and Aquinas230, will probably convince us that it was no part of the original Christian message, or of really catholic doctrine231. It was rather a speculation of Platonism taking possession of the Church. And this consideration leaves open possibilities of the ultimate extinction of personal consciousness in the lost, which Augustinianism somewhat rudely, closed.

But to have convicted our forefathers of going, in certain parts of their teaching, beyond what was certainly revealed, affords no justification for doing the same ourselves in an opposite extreme; by asserting for example positively (a) that almost all men will be 'saved'; or (b) that there is probation to be looked for beyond death; or (c) that the souls of 'the lost' will be at the last extinguished. These positive positions are no more justified than those of our forefathers which we have deprecated. We must recognize the limits of positive knowledge.

And when we have come to the end of what a legitimate reaction from the teaching of our forefathers restores to us, in the direction of a 'larger hope,' we are still face to face with the fact of 'eternal judgement.' Men, as far as their individual destinies are concerned, are passing towards one of two ends, not towards one only – a divine judgement of approval or of condemnation; and both judgements are represented as final and irreversible; and they are the inevitable outcome of the moral law by which our probation is realized – that voluntary acts form habits, and habits stereotype into a fixed character. It is foolish to look to the process or moment of death for redemption from sin; for death, as far as we know, only transplants us with the character we have made for ourselves, and with continuous consciousness, into the unknown world; so that if in this life we have unfitted ourselves for God, we must find it out beyond death, and know there the full meaning of our awful miscalculation here. And the awakening of the 'lost' to what they have cast away – to the meaning of irreversible self-exclusion from the presence of God – is imaged as unspeakably awful; and their state is pictured in metaphors and phrases descriptive both of torment and finality – 'outer darkness,' 'gnawing worm,' 'unquenchable fire,' 'eternal punishment,' 'eternal sin,' 'sin which shall not be forgiven, neither in this world, nor in that which is to come,' eternal 'death,' or exclusion from eternal life, 'eternal ruin,' 'wrath and indignation, tribulation and anguish.'

In face of all these sayings, it seems to me indisputable that 'universalism' – the teaching that there are to be none finally lost – is an instance of wilfulness. To speak of that which lies beyond death, even in the case of the worst and most impenitent criminal, as a place is, I cannot but feel, in flat contradiction to the whole tone of the New Testament.

'Where God unmakes but to remake the soulHe else made first in vain – which must not be,'

It is no doubt true that there is in the New Testament an expectation of a final unity of the whole universe in God, and that we find it hard to conceive the relation of lost souls in hell to this final unity. Certainly all legitimate avenues of dim conjecture that a very limited revelation allows to be kept open, ought to be kept open. Certainly we know in part – the partialness of our knowledge can hardly be exaggerated. But we must be true to both elements in what is disclosed to us; and Dr. Martineau has reminded us232 how deeply 'the belief in a separate heaven and hell, and a corresponding distribution of men into only two classes of good and bad, friends and enemies of God,' though 'at first sight nothing can appear more unnatural and defiant of all fact,' is yet bound up with 'the inward look' of moral evil and the fundamental reality of moral choice. In fact it seems to be true to say that a really Christian Theism, and a really Christian doctrine of human freedom, are inseparable from the belief in the possibility of wilful sin leading to final ruin.

'It is appointed unto men once to die, and after that the judgement'; and this judgement in the case of those of us who have wilfully hardened themselves, or remained loveless and love-rejecters, in face of the real offer of God to man in Christ Jesus, is a divine condemnation which takes effect in an eternal punishment, the bitterness as well as the justice of which the soul realizes, and which – if it does not necessarily mean an everlasting continuance of personal consciousness – is yet final and irreversible, and unspeakably awful233.

Some will say that the deterrent effect of the doctrine of hell depends upon its being held to be a state of strictly endless conscious torment. I do not believe this is the case. The language of the New Testament is full enough of deterrent horror if we are faithful to it.

NOTE D. See vol. i. pp. 143 ff

DIFFICULTIES ABOUT THE DOCTRINE OF THE ATONEMENT

I have endeavoured above to sketch the positive conception of the Atonement, as St. Paul seems to put it before us. Christ inaugurates the church of the new covenant, the new life of union with God. He lays its basis in a great act of reparation to the righteousness of God, which 'the old Adam' had continually outraged. This act of reparation lies in a moral sacrifice of obedience, carried to the extreme point by the shedding of His blood. This is the great propitiation in virtue of which God is enabled, without moral misunderstanding, to forgive freely the sins of any one who comes in faith to unite himself to Christ, and set him free to begin the new life.

The subject is a divine 'mystery,' and we shall never adequately probe it. Nay more, one man's thought will rightly seem inadequate to another, who has gained, or thinks he has gained, some special avenue of insight into the divine depths. But when we pass from special points of view, which are necessarily more or less individual, and can never become certainties for men in general – when we pass on to the ground of what should be the common church belief, the statement of the original revelation, it is not, it seems to me, liable to any of the familiar moral objections, or indeed a subject of any special difficulty. The difficulties experienced by the moral consciousness of our age have been due to gross and unnecessary misunderstandings, of which the following are, perhaps, the most considerable.

(1) The propitiation has become separated from the new life, for which it merely prepares the way. It has been elevated, with disastrous moral results, from a means to an end. Christ's work for us has been treated apart from His work in us, in which alone it is realized. He alone can act for all men, because He only can be their new life within. But on this see vol. i. pp. 141 f, and Ephes. pp. 54 ff.

(2) The idea of injustice has been introduced into the 'transaction' of the Atonement, and has been the most fruitful source of difficulty; – but quite unnecessarily. There is a story that when Edward VI was a child, and deserved punishment, another boy was taken and whipped in his place. This monstrously unjust transaction has been taken by Christian teachers as an illustration of the Atonement; and it is truly an illustration of the Atonement as they misconceived it. But the misconception is gratuitous: there is no real resemblance in the two cases. For first, what is represented to us in the New Testament is not that Jesus Christ, an innocent person, was punished, without reference to His own will, by a God who thus showed Himself indifferent as to whom He punished so long as some one suffered. But He, being Himself very God, the Son of the Father, the administrator of the moral law and judge of the world, of His own will became man, and suffered what the sin of the world laid upon Him, in order that He might lift the world out of sin. Voluntary self-sacrifice for others is at least not to be described as injustice. At least we rejoice to recognize that God accepts such self-sacrifice. It is to vicarious self-sacrifice like our Lord's that the human race owes the greater part of whatever moral progress it has hitherto made.

Secondly, God is not represented as imposing any specially devised punishment on His only Son in our nature. As the matter is stated in the New Testament, He required of Him obedience, the obedience proper to man; and, if we regard sympathy with our fellow men as a part of our duty to God, we may say obedience only. Thus, 'Lo, I come to do thy will, O God' is the one cry of the Christ. In His simple acceptance of the whole of human duty lies the moral essence and value of His sacrifice. All the physical and mental sufferings of Christ came out of His fulfilment of the human ideal, Godward and manward, and were involved in it. He died because obedience to the terms of His mission – 'the word of truth, and meekness, and righteousness' – in a world of sin such as this is, involved dying. 'He was obedient' without reserve – 'unto death, even the death of the cross234.' The value of the bloodshedding lies in this, so far as Scripture enables us to judge – that it represents utter obedience under conditions which human sin, the sin of Jews and Gentiles, laid upon Him: and it was in this sense, which does not leave out of consideration the mental torment caused to His sinless spirit by contact with sin235, that He 'bare our sins in his body on the tree,' and that 'the Lord made to light on him the iniquity of us all.' What is ascribed to the Father is that He 'spared not' His only Son by miraculously exempting Him from the consequences of His mission; and that He foresaw, overruled, and used for His own wise and loving purposes the sin of men236.

Thirdly and lastly, the Christ (as represented in the New Testament) did not suffer in order that we might be let off the punishment for our own sins, but in order to bring us to God. 'By his stripes we are' – not excused punishment, but – 'healed.' In fact, there are two distinguishable punishments for sin. There is the spiritual punishment, which is involved in being morally alienated from God, which may become irreversible and eternal, but which is gone when the moral alienation is gone. From this Christ delivers us in making us at one again with the Father, but He Himself did not endure it. God forbid that we should imagine such a thing! Besides this there is the temporal penalty which our sins bring as inevitable consequences upon ourselves and upon the race. All these consequences of human sin the sinless Christ bore for us, but not that we might be let off bearing them. We must bear them too – both the death of the body and the chastisement of particular sins. Christ bore the punishment of sins that were not His own, in order that in our case the punishments of sins which are our own might, through His bringing us back to God, be converted into healing chastisements and gracious penances. The record of God's dealings with His saints is still, as in Ps. xcix. 8, that they are heard, forgiven and punished.

How gratuitously then the idea of injustice has been introduced into the doctrine of Christ's sacrifice for us becomes evident when once it is brought within the scriptural limits. Christ suffered voluntarily. He suffered simply what was involved in becoming man in a world of sin. He suffered, the righteous for the unrighteous, that He might bring us back to God, that so we might have grace to bear our own sufferings and share His.

This alone, it seems to me, is what the New Testament certainly teaches. And the matter of most importance is that, ridding our minds of distracting and often needless difficulties, we should drink in, with heart and intelligence alike, the full force of what is certainly part of the Gospel – the doctrine of the one, full, perfect, and sufficient atonement with the Father, won for us by the self-sacrifice of the Christ.

NOTE E. See vol. i. p. 196

EVOLUTION AND THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE FALL

There is a wide-spread and popular notion that a marked contradiction exists between the biological theory of evolution and the Christian doctrine of the Fall, which may be stated and examined under several heads: —

I. – 'According to the theory of evolution man began his career at the bottom, emerging from purely animal life, and slowly struggled upwards to his present level of attainment. According to the Christian doctrine, on the contrary, he was created perfect, and then subsequently fell into sin and accompanying misery. Thus, according to one theory, man began at the bottom; according to the other, he began at the top.'

Now there is no doubt that when so stated the evidence is all in favour of the scientific point of view, and against the Christian. But such a contrast requires the greatest modification on both sides before it can be taken as truly representing the facts. Thus, it is not the case that the Bible suggests that man was created perfect, i.e. perfectly developed, and that his later course has been simply the effect of the Fall, i.e. a downward course. Leaving first out of account Gen. i-iii, we notice that the Bible is conspicuously, and in marked contrast to the religious books of other nations, the book of development. It looks continuously and systematically forward, not backward, for the perfecting of man. It traces the beginning of civilization in Abel, the keeper of sheep, Cain, the tiller of the ground, in Jabal, 'the father of such as dwell in tents and have cattle,' in Jubal, the father of music, 'of all such as handle the harp and pipe,' in Tubal Cain, the first forger of brass and iron work; it indicates the origin of religious worship (in some sense) at the time of Enoch, and the origin of building with the tower of Babel. The names of Noah, Abraham, Moses, Samuel, David, &c., represent stages of advance along the line of a chosen people; and later on it appears also that upon the chosen people centres a hope for all nations, and a purpose is discovered in universal history. The special intellectual qualities of various races or civilizations, as of Egypt and Tyre, are recognized by some of the prophets, and recognized as part of a divine purpose for the world237. The Bible then is the book of development; it looks forward, not backward. But it is also true that all this development is represented as having been (we may say) a second-best thing. It has not been according to God's first purpose. There has been a great and continual hindrance, which has consisted in a persistent rebellion or sin on man's part against God; and this again has had its root in a certain perversion of the heart of mankind which is regarded as approximately universal. If we now take into account again the first three chapters of Genesis (which, however, have left much less trace than is commonly supposed in the Old Testament as a whole238) we find that they describe an original act of rebellion on the part of the first human pair, which is there spoken of as at least entailing external consequences of a penal sort upon their descendants – that is death, pain, and the loss of Paradise; and that later, especially in the teaching of St. Paul, the universal moral flaw in human nature (original sin) is also represented as having its source in this initial act of rebellion.

Sin is therefore, according to our Christian scriptures, something unnatural to man: the violation of his nature by his rebellion; and it is a continual element of deterioration. But the idea that man was created perfect, i.e. so as not to need development, is not suggested. No doubt theologians, from the age of Augustine down to recent times, have done something more than suggest it. Thus Robert South supposes that 'an Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam, and Athens but the rudiments of Paradise'; and Milton implanted the idea in the imagination of Englishmen; but it is in no way suggested by the Bible, and was expressly repudiated by the earliest Christian theologians in east and west. Thus, in answer to the question whether Adam was formed perfect or imperfect, Clement of Alexandria replied, 'They shall learn from us that he was not perfect in respect of his creation, but in a fit condition to receive virtue.' And Irenaeus says that it was in the power of God to make men perfect from the beginning, but that such an initial perfection would be contrary to the law of human nature, which is the law of gradual growth239. We must therefore modify the statement of Christian doctrine from which we started, thus: —Man has been slowly led, or has slowly developed, towards the divine ideal of his Creator; but his actual development has been much less rapid and constant than it might have been, owing to the fact of sin from which he might have been free.