to reproduce the Pauline “system” as a whole, it is best to take
the form in which it appears in the Epistle to the Romans,
and then supplement it with the fresh elements in the later
epistles (so far as these seem really to be in terms of the writer’s
thought, rather than his readers’), instead of constructing an
amalgam from the whole range of his epistles taken promiscuously.
Paulinism, in the widest sense,[1] includes much
that is not distinctively his at all; what can here be given is
confined to Paul’s specific contribution to Christianity.
i. Paulinism proper springs from an absorbing passion for a righteousness real from the heart outwards, real before God. This could not be satisfied by “works of the Law,” i.e. deeds prompted by the categorical imperative of Law, itself viewed as the will of God and supported by sanctions of reward and penalty. Two things hindered; “the flesh,” the sensuous element in human nature, positively prone to sin since the first man’s trespass introduced an actual bias to evil (Rom. v. 12, 14, 19); and (the) Law itself, a form of divine claim which acted on man’s sinful nature as a challenge and irritant to his egoism, so breeding either positive rebellion or self-confident pride, but in neither case real righteousness before God. Thus the main effect of Law was negative; it brought to light the sin latent in “the flesh,” i.e. the personality as conditioned by the post-Adamic flesh. From this deliverance could come only by divine interposition or redemption, achieving at once reconciliation and regeneration by the removal of guilt and the creation of a new moral dynamic. Justification, then, or the placing of man in a state in which God could reckon him radically righteous, must be due to “grace” apart altogether from “works of law” and their desert. The medium of such grace was the Christ, in whom the claims of the dispensation of Law, in its typical form as the Jewish Thorah, were satisfied by death, while the Resurrection set the seal of God’s approval upon Christ’s fulfilment of righteousness (Rom. v. 17–19; 1 Cor. xv. 17) on the new and higher plane of filial obedience by love to God as Father.
Thus what the Law could not do, in its weakness in relation to the flesh, had been divinely achieved by God’s Son, the Messiah, in virtue of “the Spirit of life” in Him, which annulled “sin and death” in human nature (Rom. viii. 2–4), first in the flesh of Christ Himself as second Adam, and then in the humanity which should be united to Him as spiritual Head (1 Cor. xv. 45). This union was affected by faith, a profound receptivity whereby the personality of the Saviour became as it were the germ of the new moral personality of the believer. He was “in Christ” and Christ “in him” by a mutual spiritual interpenetration, begun on Christ’s side by vicarious self-sacrificing love, and consummated on the believer’s side by self-surrendering trust under the influence of the Spirit of God and Christ (Gal. ii. 20; Rom. viii. 9, 15 seq.).
Such mystic union by faith (cf. Eph. iii. 16–19) is the very nerve of Paulinism, having two main aspects. In its initial aspect, it is the real basis of justification (as radical sanctification) and regeneration: in its abiding aspect, it is the secret of progressive sanctification or assimilation to the image of Christ, Himself “the image of God.” To the one aspect corresponds the initial rite of baptism; to the other the recurring rite of communion in the Lord’s Supper. These have both an essentially corporate significance. It is as members of the mystical Body of Christ—or rather of the mystic Christ, consisting of Christ the Head and of His Body the Church—that believers, already united to the Head by faith, partake in these sacraments (1 Cor. xii. 12 seq., x. 16 seq.).
The keystone of all this is the Christ of God, the glorified Christ who appeared to Paul at his conversion, and in the rays of whose heavenly glory the earthly life of Jesus of Nazareth was ever seen. Here, as elsewhere, the mode of Paul’s conversion determined his whole perspective. It differentiated his emphasis from that of the older Judaeo-Christianity, which always started from the earthly manifestation, while it looked fixedly forward to the future manifestation in glory (of which the Resurrection appearances were the fore-gleams). To Paul the glorified Jesus or spirit-Christ (1 Cor. XV. 45; 2 Cor. iii. 18) of his vision became the Christ mystical of permanent, present Christian faith and experience. In union with Him the believer was already essentially “saved,” because possessed of Christ’s spirit of Sonship (Rom. viii. 9, 14–17, 30), although his redemption was not complete until the body was included, like the soul, in the penetrating “life” of the Spirit (viii. 23–25, 10 seq.). Accordingly he shifted the centre of gravity in Christian faith decisively from the future aspect of the Kingdom, to the present life of righteousness enjoyed by believers through “the first-fruits of the Spirit” in them. Here lay his great advance on Judaeo-Christianity, with its preponderant eschatological emphasis, along with a more external conception of Jesus, as Jewish Messiah, and of relation to Him. To this mode of thought Christ was not the very principle of the new filial righteousness. In a word, while Judaeo-Christianity only implicitly or unconsciously transcended legalism, Paulinism did so explicitly and consciously, thus safeguarding the future. For Paul’s religion was Christocentric in a sense unknown before. Compared with this, his distinctive attitude of soul to Christ, the exact metaphysical conception he formed of Christ’s pre-existence was secondary and conditioned by inherited modes of thought. His own specific contribution was his consciousness of Christ’s complete religious efficacy, which marked Him as essentially Divine, the Son of God in the highest sense conceivable under human conditions.
ii. Jesus and Paul.—In calling Paulinism “Christocentric,” one raises the question as to its relation to the Gospel proclaimed by Jesus. That Paul conceived himself as utterly dependent for his gospel upon Jesus the Christ, is not in doubt, but only how far he unconsciously modified the Gospel by making Christ its subject matter rather than its revealer. In one aspect this is but the question as to Paul’s attitude to the historic Jesus over again: yet it is more. Granting that Paul felt his gospel to be in essential agreement with the words and deeds of Jesus of Nazareth, as known to him, it remains to ask whether he did not put all into so fresh a perspective as to change the relative emphasis on points central to the teaching of Jesus, and so alter its spirit. A school of writers, by no means unappreciative of Paul as they understand him, of whom W. Wrede may be taken as example, answer that Paul so changed Christianity as to become its “second founder”—the real founder of ecclesiastical Christianity as distinct from the Christianity of Jesus. They say, “either Jesus or Paul: it cannot be both at once.” They urge not only that Paulinism is involved in certain “mythological” conceptions, by its view of sin, of redemption and of the pre-existent celestial person of the Redeemer; but also that, apart from the Rabbinic and anti-Rabbinic element in Paul, his whole mystical attitude towards Christ as the medium of redemption (an idea borrowed, they say, not from Jesus Himself but from the religion of the Mysteries) is alien to the sunny and sane teaching of Jesus as to God and man, and their true relations.
The essential issue here is this. Could Jesus the Messiah set forth the Gospel in the same perspective as a devoted disciple of His? Must not the personal embodiment of the life of the Messianic kingdom by Jesus Himself, and so His personality, become the prime medium through which this life in its essential features, and especially in its spirit of devoted love, attains and maintains its hold upon the souls of men? Surely the new life must appear most fully and movingly sub specie Christi; and the imitatio Christi, in an inner sense which finds in Him the very principle of the new Christian consciousness as to God and man, must be the most direct and morally potent means to the realization of the Christ-type. Thus to say that Paulinism is practically and proximately “Christocentric,” is not to deny that it is ultimately and theoretically “Theocentric,” if only Christ be regarded as the revealer of God the Father, and that in virtue of a special community of nature with Him as Son. It may be questioned whether Paul attained, or indeed had within his reach in that age, the best intellectual equivalent of his religious intuition of Christ as “mediator between God and man.” But it is another matter to question whether his intuition that the personality of the Christ Himself was the secret of the spiritual power latent in His Gospel, be a true interpretation of the Gospel as it appears even in the Synoptics.[2] Thus the truth seems to lie rather with those who see in Paul “Jesus’s most genuine disciple” (H. Weinel), the one who best understood and reproduced His thought. True, Jesus’s Gospel is one seen through the sinless consciousness of the Saviour, while Paul’s is one seen through the eyes of a conscious sinner. But that is the perspective in which mankind generally has to view the Gospel; and apart from the special intensity of Paul’s personal experience of sin, the Gospel as it “found” him may surely be in principle the needful experimental complement to the Gospel as set forth in more ideal form by Jesus Himself. By restoring Jesus’s own stress upon “eternal life” as present rather than future, and that on lines other than those of obedience to a divine law, Paul saved Christianity from a judaizing of the universal and spiritual religion with which Jesus had in fact inspired His personal disciples, but which they had not been able to grasp.
No doubt there is another side to all this, the side of Paul’s idiosyncrasy, both religiously and as a thinker. The peculiar depth and form of Paul’s religious experience, especially as regards sin, have proved a limitation to his direct and full influence. While “numberless men have discovered themselves in reading Paul,” more have not been “found” by him; and of those who have felt the religious appeal of his writings, not a few have gravely misunderstood the theoretic setting of his message. Indeed misunderstanding, one way or another, was Paul’s usual lot in the ancient Church,[3] as regards his most distinctive ideas, due partly to the difficult form in which some of those ideas were couched. But to say this is little more than saying that Paulinism is a less universal form of the Gospel
than that given it by his Master Jesus Christ. To do full justice- ↑ One of the best critical summaries of “Pauline Theology” is that by E. Hatch in the Ency. Brit. 9th ed.
- ↑ The whole history of Christianity is proof that the personality of Jesus has counted for more in producing Christians than his teaching per se, that is, his Gospel in the narrower sense. And it was Paul, not the older apostles, who first concentrated attention on that personality as the type and pledge of man’s potential sonship to God.
- ↑ See S. Means, Saint Paul and the ante-Nicene Church (1903).
