^^>,^l.^TA^,^l¦^l--!-_JL^[^-3-_I¦!,l,!,uu,^^^^^^l.^l,u,^lAl¦u.^l.^l.l.^'.l.^^^lU-3 YALE UNIVERSITY Xibrarg of the ©toinitg School GIFT OF Douglas Qlgflt Macintosh DWIGHT PROFESSOR OF THEOLOGY DWIGHT PROFESSOR OF THEOLOGY AND I PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 1916-1942 '¦"¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦ ¦¦¦" »¦""¦¦» ¦'¦¦iwiwiwhwivitwiwiu imwimr- ittotiern Keligfoug ^roblemg EDITED BY AMBROSE WHITE VERNON PAUL AND PAULINISM BY JAMES MOFFATT, D. D. AUTHOR OF "THE HISTORICAL NEW TESTAMENT" BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY (Che rftirjertfiue press Camfmbge igio COPVRIGHT, IQIO, BY JAMES MOFFATT ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Published February iqio PAUL AND PAULINISM Genesis, says Tertullian in the fifth book of his treatise against Marcion, — Genesis promised me Paul long ago. For, he adds (playing upon a Latin rendering of Genesis xlix : 27), when Jacob -was ¦pronouncing typical and prophetic blessings over his sons, he turned to Benjamin and said, " Benjamin is a ravening wolf ; in the morning he shall devour his prey, but towards evening he shall provide foodP He foresaw that Paul would spring from Benjamin, " a ravening wolf, devouring his prey in the morning'''' : that is, in early life he would lay waste the flocks of God as a persecutor of the churches ; then towards evening he would provide 1 PAUL AND PAULINISM food: that is, in his declining years he would train the sheep of Christ as a teacher of the nations. This fanciful exegesis of the African father brings out three salient features in the career and character of Paul. (a) He was a full-blooded Jew by birth, who was keen upon his national faith; (J?) his religious experience fell into two sharply divided periods ; and (c) his services to the great Christian mission were rendered during the late afternoon of his life. He did not begin to write the letters by which he is best known till he had been a Christian for about twenty years, and he was over forty when he inaugurated the Gentile pro paganda in Asia Minor and Europe. The first of these features acquires its true significance in the light of the second. Paul received a sound and strict religious training, first from his parents at Tarsus, the capital of Cilicia, and then at Jerusalem, whither he was sent to stud}' under Gama- 2 PAUL AND PAULINISM liel. The rabban belonged like himself to the clan of Benjamin; he was distinguished not only on account of his reverence for the Law, but by his comparatively liberal atti tude to Greek culture, — a combination of qualities which should relieve us from the unreal dilemma of referring his great pupil's Judaism to the Hellenistic type or to the rabbinic. Unmistakable traces of both ap pear in Paul's theology, but the paramount trait of his character was its Pharisaism. With the Sadducees he was totally out of sympathy. His deeply religious nature in clined him to the Pharisaic traditions of his family, for Pharisaism was one of those religious schools which command and wel come moral enthusiasm. I was circumcised on the eighth day, he writes in his old age ; / belonged to the race of Israel, to the tribe of Benjamin', I was the Hebrew son of Hebrew parents', in the matter of the Law I was a Pharisee; as for zeal, I per- 3 PAUL AND PAULINISM secutedthe church; tested by righteousness within the limits of the Law, I proved blameless. . . . Tou have heard of my erst while career as a few, how excessively I persecuted and ravaged the church of God, and how I outstripped many of my con temporaries in Jewish pursuits, intensely zealous as I was for the traditions of my fathers. Such words enable us to slip in side the soul of Paul in his pre-Christian days. From the very outset he was proud of his religion, with the moral pride which makes a man feel, especially in his early years, that no sacrifices should be too costly for the sake of the great cause. Whatever he believed, he believed ardently and thor oughly. His was one of those natures which are not satisfied unless in working out and thinking out their faith. Gamaliel had a reputation for mildness and moderation, but his brilliant young pupil flung himself with fanatical zeal into the task of stamp- 4 PAUL AND PAULINISM ing out the new heresy of the Nazarenes. He must have recognized in its messianic belief a spirit which was fatal to the essen tial principles of Judaism. The primitive community of the adherents of Jesus at Je rusalem might frequent the temple and con tinue to act as if their new faith were com patible with the worship and tenets of the Law, but Paul's stringent logic, fostered by his keen religious sense, penetrated to the inward significance of this new movement. The Nazarenes confessed, Jesus is Lord. Paul's watchword was, Jesus is anathema. He saw nothing but blasphemy in the attempt to connect the glorious messianic hope of Israel with the career of a Galilean peasant who had perished ignominiously by the hands of the Roman authorities. The vigour with which the Palestinian church was harried had driven a number of refugees, after the martyrdom of Ste phen, into the far north, not only to Syrian 5 PAUL AND PAULINISM Antioch, but eastward to Damascus, in the Nabataean domain. Paul determined to follow up the latter. His zeal was unslaked, and he succeeded in obtaining permission and authority from the high priest to arrest any Nazarenes whom he could discover in the synagogues of Damascus. The idea was that he should pursue the same short and easy way with these dissenters as had already proved effective. The next news which reached the authorities, however, was that the mission had collapsed; to their disgust and amazement, they learned that their brilliant young agent had become a renegade. The object of his immediate retiral into the lonely territory east or south of Da mascus was to think out, unmolested by his former allies, the bearings of his new posi tion. What had made him a Christian, he invariably confessed, was a vision of the Lord Jesus. And the same vision, which 6 PAUL AND PAULINISM had arrested him with a flash of light on pagan soil, made him conscious that he had a special vocation to the Gentiles. We do not possess sufficient data for any psycho logical account of the crisis. But such vi sions do not happen in a vacuum. The origin of Paul's Christianity was something more than a sunstroke or a fit of epilepsy at noon upon the road to Damascus ; it was a reve lation, mediated by some profound internal conflict which must have been going on within his soul. We may easily make the mis take of reading too much into the words which came to him in the vision, — Saul, Saul, why art thou persecuting me? It is ill for thee to kick against the goad, — but they suggest that his harrying of the Naz arenes had been one of those meritorious actions in vindication of the Law by which he hoped to please God, yet in which he was conscious that he did not gain peace of mind; his recent vehemence may have 7 PAUL AND PAULINISM been also due in part to the fact that he was fighting down some secret misgivings, occasioned or at any rate deepened by the impression which the people he was attack ing made upon his mind. It is natural to think of Stephen in this connexion. Stephen, it is true, did not proclaim the mission to the Gentiles, nor did he assail the validity of the Law. But his reading of Jewish his tory as a long obstinate resistance to the Spirit of God tallies with the words which we have just quoted, and, although Paul never ranks Stephen's dying vision of the Lord among the appearances of the risen Christ, it was probably an incident which sank deep into his soul. Some uneasiness of this kind, implying that Paul was brood ing secretly over the meaning of the new faith, together with a sense of moral de spair which grew upon him the more con scientious he strove to be, may be conjec tured to have lain under the vision near 8 PAUL AND PAULINISM Damascus. While they did not produce it, they created an atmosphere for it. Paul himself naturally calls the change abrupt and sudden, just as he emphasizes its divine reality, upon the other hand, by excluding all human influences. But this does not imply necessarily that he had been uncon scious till that moment of any mysterious leaning towards the Nazarene faith or of any questionings about his own position before God, any more than it rules out the possibility that, like Wesley, he was helped in his early Christian hours by pious men, whose names were never known. Probably Ananias of Damascus was one of the latter. Whatever process of reflection Paul went through in Arabia, he left his tem porary seclusion with the characteristic resolve that he would consecrate the prose lytizing zeal of a Pharisee to the task of spreading the message of a gospel which cut up Pharisaism by the roots. Unfortu- 9 PAUL AND PAULINISM nately, his movements at this point become rather obscure. We learn, however, that two or three years after his conversion, finding neither Damascus nor Jerusalem a safe or congenial sphere of work, he retired to Syria and Cilicia. There he laboured for nearly fourteen years. The account in Acts xi-xiv, which rests on some reliable Antiochene traditions, nar rates that during the latter part of the time he took an active share in the mission at Antioch, the capital of Syria, which had become the headquarters of an aggressive and expansive Gentile mission. But if he wrote any epistles during the period, none has survived. These long years must have been pregnant and formative; they cover his first mission-sphere, and it is a distinct loss to be deprived of any records from his own pen which would throw light upon the inward and outward course of events. Titus was one of his chief converts, but 10 PAUL AND PAULINISM unluckily the Book of Acts ignores him altogether, as it ignores the first two thirds of these fourteen years. We may feel cer tain, however, that this protracted mis sion, especially in its Arabian and pre- Antioch years, did not represent any slow process by means of which Paul became gradually conscious of what his mission and commission to the Gentiles involved. If there was any uncertainty upon the right of Gentiles to believe in Jesus with out becoming Jews, it was among the primitive apostles at Jerusalem, who still shared the idea that the object of Jesus was to regenerate Israel primarily in order to inherit the joys and glories of his mes sianic reign. If one test of a vision is not only that it transforms the life of the man who receives it, but inspires and enables him to effect a similar change in the life of others, Paul's experience of Jesus Christ answered to this n PAUL AND PAULINISM criterion. From the first he was conscious of a vocation. He who set me apart from my very birth and called me by his grace was pleased to reveal to me his Son, that I might bring the good news of him to the nations. Elsewhere, after speaking of the new world which faith in Christ meant and made for him, — when a man comes to be in Christ, there is a fresh creation, — he at once adds, and it is all of God, -who re conciled us to himself through Jesus Christ and commissioned us to be ministers of the reconciliation, namely, to proclaim that in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, instead of reckoning men's trespasses against them, and that he has entrusted us with the message of recon ciliation. Words like these, in which we get the man's whole life distilled, could not have come from an ordinary believer. Had Paul been content to remain a Jewish Christian after the type of James or Peter, 12 PAUL AND PAULINISM his career, like that of Christianity, would have been very different. But there is not enough evidence to prove that Paulinism represents the outcome of his mature reflec tions, after he had emancipated himself from any such Jewish Christian stage. Three in cidental allusions have sometimes been taken to imply an immature phase of Paul's Christian life, in practice as well as in the ory: viz. («) If I were still pleasing men, I would not be Chris fs servant.1 (£) If I still preach circumcision, why am I still persecuted? 2 (c) Even though we did know Christ after the flesh, we no longer know him in this way.* None of these passages, however, will support the inference in ques tion. The first means, " If, after all that has happened in my life, I were still trying to curry favour with people, instead of being single-minded, I would be no true servant of Christ. But I do not serve two masters." 1 Gal. i: 10. * Gal. v. ii. 3 2 Cor. v : 16. 13 PAUL AND PAULINISM The supposition is purely hypothetical. Whether men means the apostles at Jeru salem or men in general, the sense of the words is the same. In the latter case, the insinuation which Paul repudiates would be parallel to that behind (b), where again he is retorting upon those who brought up his past against him. Here too it was not his pre-Christian past but his conduct as a Christian apostle, particularly his recent circumcision of Timotheus,1 which lent plausibility to the charge. This concession was misrepresented by his opponents. They declared, not that Paul secretly considered circumcision to mean a higher stage or level of Christian experience, from which he sought to exclude Christians of Gentile birth, but that in his heart of hearts he really believed circumcision to be a vital element in the Christian praxis, and that he tried to persuade the bulk of Gentile 1 Acts xvi : 3. PAUL AND PAULINISM Christians it was unessential simply in order to gain their gratitude by arranging to ex empt them from a painful and humiliating rite. This would be time-serving, Paul re torts, and time-servers, whose chief end is popularity, are not served as I am being served! If it is my usual custom to preach a Christianized Pharisaism, based on the observance of Jewish ritual instead of faith in a crucified Christ, why am I persecuted still by people who resent the message of the Cross? The third passage (<:) is more difficult. Here Paul is not replying to any sneering comment upon his consistency, but contrasting two aspects of Christ which had presented themselves to his mind. One of these, that after the flesh, has been in terpreted to mean a personal knowledge of Jesus during his life-time on earth, such as the twelve had enjoyed. But it is more than doubtful if Paul ever came in contact with Jesus at Jerusalem. Besides, had this been IS PAUL AND PAULINISM his meaning, we should have expected him to say Jesus instead of Christ, and, at other points, where an allusion to such know ledge would have come in with telling effect, he is silent. The knowledge of Christ after the flesh is probably the mes sianic belief of Pharisaic theology such as Paul had shared in his pre-Christian days. The context of the passage, with its con trast between the inside and the outside view of Christ, militates against the idea that he is referring to some earlier period or phase of his Christian experience, during which he still viewed Jesus under the cat egories of this Pharisaic messianism. The words are an aside, and like all asides they convey a meaning which is not easily caught. But their import is, " Though as a Jew I knew this type of messiah, — a na tional hero or official figure, robed in ex- clusiveness and external glory, — yet now, as a Christian, I know a messiah who died 16 PAUL AND PAULINISM for alV The whole passage confirms the impression that in Galatians i: 15-17 Paul is not reading back into his initial expe rience of Jesus Christ the richer memo ries and ampler deposit of the intervening years. From the very outset, a better knowledge of Christ's nature had shone upon him. The crisis of his conversion had been the dawn of a new world. It was as if God had said, Let there be light, and there was light.1 The conception of Jesus as the messiah who had suffered on the cross and risen from the dead was a vision which meant not only a revision of all his previous messianic ideas but a re-casting of his nature; indeed, this radical change, in which his whole nature was melted and moulded by the power of the Lord, completely altered his religious opinions about messiah or the Christ, and the latter change began from the moment when he * 2 Cor. iv : 6. 17 PAUL AND PAULINISM stumbled to his feet on the highroad out side Damascus. Certainly, after he returned from Arabia, he cannot have hesitated for a moment to preach that the door of faith was open to the Gentiles, and that they did not require to enter the church and king dom of God through any postern-gate of circumcision. It was, in fact, the success of the Gentile mission upon these open principles which aroused the suspicions of the narrower Jewish Christians in Jerusalem. Their policy, if left unchallenged, would simply have added another party, that of the Nazarenes, to Judaism. Their interference with the church at Antioch, however, pre cipitated the issue between Jewish and Gentile Christianity. Whatever authority they had or pretended to have from the twelve apostles, Paul determined to lay the case before the latter. A door must be either open or shut, and he was resolved 18 PAUL AND PAULINISM to settle once for all the question whether Gentile Christians were obliged to conform to the Jewish Torah, on pain of being re garded, like the uncircumcised proselytes of Judaism, as outsiders, in a more or less secondary and inferior position. The stricter Jewish Christian party at Jerusalem did not object to pagans becom ing believers in Jesus; they simply insisted that, as the divine Torah, ceremonial and moral, was still obligatory, such converts must be circumcised, as Jesus himself had been, and be bound over to observe the legal requirements. Even among the Jews themselves, at this period, it was debated whether circumcision should be enforced on proselytes; possibly the later idea that messiah's appearance would set aside the obligations of the Law was already current in some quarters. But in any case, a strong party in the Jerusalem church leaned to the strict views of the dominant Pharisaism. 19 PAUL AND PAULINISM No personal record of the primitive apos tles is extant, to show how they felt on the matter. The narrative in the fifteenth chapter of Acts is the semi-official and later version of a church historian who naturally sought to soften the sharp edges of the original controversy. Paul's account, in the second chapter of Galatians, states the case bluntly from his own standpoint. But even the latter shows that the leading apostles as a whole were too large-minded to support the narrower Jewish Christians against Paul. They did not demur to the gospel which Paul preached, that is, to its essential principles of faith. Upon the con trary, he managed to persuade them that it was the gospel, as effective in his hands as in theirs. The concordat ultimately arrived at was that while James, Peter, and John should prosecute the Jewish Christian mis sion, Paul and Barnabas were to devote themselves to the Gentile Christians. The 20 PAUL AND PAULINISM respective spheres of operation were thus delimited roughly, in order to avoid need less friction. But the treaty involved the toleration of Paul's gospel to Gentile Chris tians, and in a case like this, toleration of practice was equivalent to a tacit recogni tion of principle. The propaganda of the extreme anti-Pauline party was check mated. But the party had other moves to make; Paul soon found that his difficulties were not over. Shortly afterwards, Peter was guilty of vacillation during a visit to Antioch. It was more easy to agree to a principle than to act upon it consistently, and while he began by associating freely with Gentile Christians, nevertheless, when certain persons came from James, as Paul contemptuously put it, he began to draw back. The plain sense of the words is that these emissaries of James believed, as Paul believed, that they had some authority from James for interposing. What instruc- 21 PAUL AND PAULINISM tions they had, and how far they went beyond them, we cannot ascertain. Paul dealt not with them, but with Peter, as the responsible authority on the spot. He censured the senior apostle sharply for his practical opportunism. What passed be tween Paul and the emissaries of James is left untold ; all we know is that these high and hard churchmen pursued him ever afterwards with a counter-mission, spread ing insinuations against his character, dis crediting his authority, and impugning the adequacy of his gospel. Hitherto his oppo nents had been pagans and Jews. Now, throughout his second sphere of opera tions, they included Christian Judaists. If the mission treaty of Jerusalem was drawn up with any idea of removing Paul from the danger-zone of the narrower party, it proved a failure. The quarrel at Antioch had another un fortunate result for Paul. It deprived him 22 PAUL AND PAULINISM of his former colleague, Barnabas. Barna bas was of the willow rather than of the oak order, and Peter's bad example had car ried him away. Paul was not in a mood to be conciliatory. He had lost confidence in Barnabas, and eventually chose Silas or Sil- vanus, who belonged to the more liberal party in the Jerusalem church, as a coad jutor in the new mission. For he now was planning a second enterprise. His range of operations widened. The conception of a mission to the world had fastened on his imagination, and he went further afield than he had yet gone. After revisiting Syria and Cilicia, he broke new ground successfully in northern Galatia, but evidently he did not feel free to continue work in Asia. A mysterious attraction drew him west, and eventually he started upon the great mis sion to Europe, or rather to Macedonia and Achaia. The preliminary campaign occu pied nearly three years. When this was 23 PAUL AND PAULINISM over, he returned upon his track to Galatia, and finally settled down for a couple of years at Ephesus, where he could keep in touch with Asia and Europe for the pur pose of supervising his churches in these regions. Before his last visit to the Euro pean churches, he had written the extant letters to Thessalonica, Galatia, and Cor inth. The fruitful evening, of which Ter- tullian spoke, had opened, so far as the ministry of writing was concerned. The problem of a third sphere now emerged. What was to be his next mis sion? Not the southern Mediterranean. Egypt apparently was already being evan gelized by other Christians, and Paul's guid ing principle was to find virgin soil for his gospel. In a letter to the church of Rome, written towards the end of his European mission, he summed up the situation thus : From Jerusalem right round to Ulyria I have fully preached the gospel of Christ, 24 PAUL AND PAULINISM my great aim being to evangelize places where Christ's name has not been men tioned, in order to avoid building on another man's foundation. Rome he had often desired to visit. But meanwhile Rome, like Egypt, had been evangelized by un known Christians from Palestine or Egypt. The one sphere available lay in Spain or the western Mediterranean; he felt shut up to this and proposed to travel thither, taking Rome on the way, after he had dis charged a pious duty to the church at Jeru salem by handing over the proceeds of a collection which his Galatian, Macedonian, and Achaian churches had generously made on behalf of the Christian poor within the Jewish capital. His plans, however, were rudely interrupted by an outburst of Jew ish fanaticism. He was arrested by the Roman authorities at Jerusalem, detained for two years in prison at Csesarea Philippi, and finally despatched to be tried as a 25 PAUL AND PAULINISM Roman citizen before the emperor at Rome. So far as we can learn, he was never set free. The projected tour to Spain fell through. One or two letters written during his imprisonment survive. Those to the churches of Colossae and Philippi reveal some of his maturer ideas upon the person of Christ especially; the private notes, such as that to Philemon and the fragments imbedded in the pastoral Epistles, are of purely personal interest. Otherwise, no reli able traditions as to his fortunes in Rome have been preserved, and even Luke's record of the events between the arrest in Jerusalem and the arrival in Rome leaves several serious lacunce. A mist gathers round the end as well as round the opening of the apostle's life. All we know is that he must have been put to death under Nero about the middle of the seventh decade. 26 II The history of primitive Christianity has been sometimes written as if it were a Pauline epic. Paul is by far the greatest personality known to us within the church of the first century; it had no leader, no evangelist, no thinker, like him. But it would be unhistorical, for example, to iden tify Gentile Christianity with Pauline Chris tianity, any more than the primitive church with Jewish Christianity, or to assume that, because Paul's Epistles precede the Gospels, to which alone, in point of size and value, they rank second, they there fore reflect the dim, common, central view of Christianity as it was preached and lived throughout the early church. There was a distinctive stamp of thought and style in Paul's Epistles. He was the first theolo- 27 PAUL AND PAULINISM gian of the faith, the master-mind of his age within the Christian church. But while an original genius has his own contribution of independent insight to offer, he does not ignore the truths which his contemporaries have already recognized. He either repeats them in his own way or brings out their unsuspected significance, and one problem for later ages is to determine how far he transcends the environment to which he is indebted and of which he must be in one sense representative. This is the question which we are bound to ask ourselves as we confront the appearance of Paul and Paul- inism within the primitive church. The following pages are an attempt to state it, rather than to answer it, in bare outline. The safest temper in which to enter upon such a survey is a thoroughgoing scepticism of all historical reconstructions which leave the early Christian period like a neatly coloured map, with the dominant 28 PAUL AND PAULINISM spheres of Paulinism, Jewish Christianity, and so forth, spaced out rigidly. The prob lem is too complex, we might almost say that it is too human, for solutions of this kind. Assuming, however, as we must, that Paul's conception of the gospel had a cachet of its own which entitles us to call his method of statement by the convenient term of " Paulinism," let us try to gauge very briefly what seems to have been most characteristic and distinctive in his preach ing. It goes without saying that he was not the first to proclaim that Jesus Christ was the one hope for men. Before he had ceased to be a pupil of Gamaliel, the primitive Christians at Jerusalem had confessed that there is no other name under heaven whereby we must be saved. Paul was not even the first to preach the gospel to Gen tiles, though he was the first to do so on a large scale and with a thorough grasp of all 29 PAUL AND PAULINISM that it involved. He was not the first to connect the death and resurrection of Jesus with the forgiveness of sins. This formed part of the common gospel preached throughout the early church. / handed on to you, he told the Christians at Corinth, first of all that which I myself had re ceived : namely, that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures (i. e. of the Old Testament), and that he was bur ied, and that he rose on the third day ac cording to the scriptures, and that he was seen by Cephas, then by the twelve; after that he was seen by above five hundred brothers at once, the majority of whom are alive to this day, though some sleep in death; after that he was seen by James, then by all the apostles, and finally by myself too. . . . Be it I then or they, such is what we preach and such was your be lief. It is curious and at the same time unfortunate that the three specific refer- 3° PAUL AND PAULINISM ences to my gospel in the Pauline litera ture throw very little light upon the prob lem of the relationship between what Paul received and what he originated. Romans ii: 17 does not reflect a distinctive idea of Paul; neither does Romans xvi: 25, even if it is accepted as a genuine word of the apostle, while the Paulinist who wrote 2 Timothy ii : 8 (see 1 Timothy i: 11) simply echoes Romans i : 3, 4. The gen eral impression left by these passages is, as we might expect, that the characteris tic traits of Paul's gospel were visible in what he preached about Jesus Christ. What stamped his Christianity as his own was his estimate of the person and work of Jesus as the Son of God. Even his ethi cal conceptions do not differentiate him so markedly from the primitive church as his doctrinal. For one thing, his ethic at bottom is usually in line with that of Jesus as we find it reflected in the earliest traditions of 3i PAUL AND PAULINISM the Palestinian church, and for another thing, his ethic is simply the application and issue of that faith in Jesus Christ which supplied him with material for the state ment and enforcement of moral obliga tions. Paulinism, in short, was the outcome of the apostle's attempt to think out for himself the relations of the Lord Jesus Christ to God, the Law, the universe, and the church. His interpretation draws upon sev eral sources, which are more or less visi ble. One is the piety and prophecies of the Old Testament. Another is his Pharisaic theology, with its belief in angels, in the resurrection, in judgment, in inspiration, and so forth. Another lies in such ideas of paganism, determinism, natural religion, etc., as were familiar to him from religious literature like the Wisdom of Solomon, or in conceptions such as are familiar to us, at any rate, in the pages of his contemporary, Philo. Popular Stoicism and the mysteries 32 PAUL AND PAULINISM may also be felt vibrating through one or two sections of his system. But the su preme source lay in a vivid personal expe rience of Jesus Christ, as he verified that in himself and in the lives of others. Amid the changing, ranging fancies of the age, which swayed from one form of mytho logy or ritual to another, he carried steadily what he termed the mind of Christ, his consciousness of Jesus as the absolute and unique Lord of all, his conviction that through Jesus the world was coherent and intelligible as otherwise it could not be. There were idiosyncrasies in his thought, there were daring flights of speculation, in which few of his contemporaries or successors in the church could follow him; but the fundamental faith which underlay his gospel was neither an idiosyncrasy nor a speculation. Paul was a Christian before he was a Paulinist, and even when he is most independent and unique, most tech- 33 PAUL AND PAULINISM nical in his dialectic and most original in his exposition, the controlling interest of his argument is to draw out what appeared to him the significance of all that was im plied in the Jesus whom he and his fellow- Christians worshipped as their Lord. Thus the sources of a Pauline ideaareless important, from our point of view, than what Paul drew from them. Wherever the fruit was gathered and on whatever soil it had originally grown, he pressed the grapes him self and poured the new wine into his own wine-skins. Hence, in order to appreciate the quality of this Paulinism, as distinct from the wine of thought which nourished other Christians, it is essential to begin with some fundamental conception common, in germ at least, to both. The most vital and central is that of the Spirit^ in relation to the person of Christ and to the Christian experience. It is from this, and not from any dialectic about justification, that our estimate of the 34 PAUL AND PAULINISM subject ought to start. While the primitive apostolic view regarded the Spirit as the endowment which Jesus received at bap tism for his messianic vocation upon earth, deeper reflection upon the significance of the Lord's personality soon led to a double development of this relationship between the Spiritand Jesus. On the one hand, a grow ing conviction of his divine nature could not rest satisfied with any tradition which left his antecedents unaccounted for; conse quently the Spirit came to be associated with his birth. On the other hand, and at an earlier date, the function of the Spirit was asso ciated with his resurrection : Jesus, it was held, became truly messiah when he was raisedjrpm the dead. Some traces of this conception lie in juxtaposition with the baptism-idea, even inside the primitive apos tolic tradition, but it was Paul who gave fullest expression to it. This was only nat ural, as he did not belong to the circle of dis- 35 PAUL AND PAULINISM ciples who had known Jesus on earth, and as his first experience of the Lord was a vi sion of Jesus as the risen and exalted Christ. Thejgajityjjf Christ's nature was Spirit, on his view; Jesus was installed or consti tuted Son of God with full powers by the resurrection, which revealed and realized his true nature as life-giving Spirit. His life in the flesh had limited him. It was a phase of being which could not do justice to him. But when that temporary impoverishment of nature was over, the heavenly reality shone out in its fulness. The Spirit radiated on men, it was poured into their hearts, as the Spirit of one who had died and risen for the sake of men. We must extinguish, how ever, the misconception that Paul regarded the Spirit as acting on the lines of a natural force in the evolution of the religious life. To him it meant the gracious power of God which evoked faith in Jesus as the crucified and risen Christ and then mediated to the 36 PAUL AND PAULINISM receptive, obedient life all that the Lord was and did for his own people. The_Sp_irit, in this usage of Paul, is not to be regarded as equivalent to the mere in fluence of God. It includes an ontological as well ^s an ethical element, in modern parlance, and this applies not simply to the glorified nature of the risen Christ, but to the believing man upon whom the vital power of that nature streams out. The Spirit affects the organism of the human spirit ; it is hyper-physical as well as moral in its work ing. Paul shrank, for example, with Phari saic dislike, from any Hellenic conception of the immortality of the soul apart from a body. His realism made him shudder at any idea of disembodiment. It is not possible to determine his exact view of the risen body, which he regarded as essential to the risen life; sometimes he suggests that the present body will be transformed, sometimes that an entirely fresh body will be ours; but he 37 PAUL AND PAULINISM certainly believed in the creation of a new organism by the Spirit which should be adequate to the needs of the new spirit. Upon the opposite side Paul safeguarded his conception against vague fancies by iden tifying the Spirit of God, which had been promised as a messianic gift, with the Spirit of Jesus the Christ. This association of the idea with the personality of Jesus lent it pre cision and reality. It was not a mere force or a supernatural power like the numerous spirits and oracles in the pagan world; the Spirit of Christ is to Paul the Spirit. The Lord, he once said, is the Spirit. To be in the Spirit means not ecstasy and transports but a life in Christ, an identification or incor poration of one's self with him, which dif fers on the one hand from the reveries of a mystical pantheism, and on the other from the frenzy of prophetic raptures. This identification was one of Paul's most characteristic and fruitful achievements in 38 PAUL AND PAULINISM the field of Christian doctrine. Jesus was the Christ of God, and the proof of that was the Spirit. So far Paul and his contemporaries were at one. Where he went beyond them was in his definition of that proof. To the primitive church in Jerusalem the death of Jesus seemed primarily a crime of the Jews which, in God's order of providence, was connected with the forgiveness of sins. The resurrection of Jesus led them to seek proofs of this in Old Testament prophecy, and to anticipate the speedy return of Jesus in full messianic glory in order to complete the establishment of the divine kingdom. Mean time the ecstatic phenomena of the Spirit were hailed, according to Joel's prophecy, as the harbingers of this final era. Paul took what was at once a wider and a deeper view. Though he never appealed, as the primitive church did, to the miracles of Jesus as proof of his messianic authority, he too regarded the contemporary phenomena of the Spirit 39 PAUL AND PAULINISM as an authentic proof of Christ's messianic position. Had there been no resurrection of Jesus, there would have been no Spirit visible and audible in the lives of believing men. But the Spirit came to represent not so much an ecstatic as an ethical power to Paul ; it was the vital principle of the Chris tian life, rather than an endowment for special occasions, and he verified it, not in sudden raptures or transient fits of religious emotion or any mysterious excitement of the personality, but in the normal life of the Christian within the church. The vine of the primitive church throve on volcanic soil. But the ardent hope of the end was not nourished upon mere inferences from pro phecy; it was rooted in the leaf-mould of experience. Only, this experience was an infinitely richer and deeper thing to Paul than to most of his contemporaries; what they took usually to be primary seemed to him secondary and subsidiary. It was one of 40 PAUL AND PAULINISM those changes of emphasis in religion which are epoch-making. He did believe that mi raculous, intermittent powers were an en dowment of the Spirit ; he was conscious of possessing them himself, and he included them among the gifts of the Spirit to the church. God supplies you with the Spirit, he told the Christians of Galatia, and works miracles among you. And yet the charac teristic outcome of the Spirit, after all, lay not in extraordinary phenomena, but in love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, bene ficence, fidelity, meekness, and self-control. It was along this line that Paul commonly connected the Spirit with his eschatology. Such effects of the Spirit were to him the first-fruits and pledge of a final bliss which could not be enjoyed until the believer was delivered from the thwarting and corrupting influences of the world, the flesh, and the devil. Sometimes, as in i Thessalonians,the Spirit as the power of the Christian experi- 41 PAUL AND PAULINISM ence was not directly related to the ardent hope of the end; the doctrinal position here lies closer to the simple and popular piety of the churches; as a rule, however, the con vinced hope of the end is allied to that faith- mysticism of the Christian's union with Christ which is well known to all readers of the Epistles. One germ of the latter concep tion lay in the primitive view of baptism into the name of Jesus, which implied an identifi cation of the recipient with the nature of the Lord; but Paul developed the idea in his own way, eschatologically and otherwise. The eschatological aspect of the Spirit can also be traced even within the concep tion of Christ's death in relation to the Law, on which Paul generally based his faith- rnvsticigm^ Into the ramifications of this theory we cannot enter here, but the salient features of it are quite familiar and they will suffice for our present purpose. Obviously, the fact that Jesus had died under the Law 42 PAUL AND PAULINISM compelled Paul to readjust his inherited ideas about the Law, Israel, and God. The significance of that death lay in the sinless nature of Jesus. The primitive church as a rule was content to view the crucifixion in the light of the mysterious prophecy of God's suffering servant in Isaiah liii, interpreted by the current Jewish belief in the expia tory value of the sufferings and death of the righteous. Paul assumed the latter as axio matic, though he never worked much with the Isaianic prophecy. Jesus, he held, vol untarily took the place of sinful men as they lay under the curse and condemnation of a Law whose statutes they were unable to keep. To his sombre vision, as he looked behind and around him, Sin and Death, like allied powers, were crushing men with all the added momentum which they had ac quired during the ages since Adam first disobeyed. But Jesus interposed. Thp inno cent suffejgd_fj3i_ihe-giulty. He graciously 43 PAUL AND PAULINISM bore in his own person the consequence of sin for men, and this vicarious endurance of sin's penalty availed before God to justify, r save from the divine wrath at the end, 11 who accepted him as the Christ of God. Such a forensic theory, which represents an attempt to interpret in terms of Pharisaic theology the relations between the death of Christ and the guilt rather than the power of sin, appears to ignore the Spirit and also to make faith little more than intellectual assent to a doctrine. But when we cease to isolate it or to regard it as the primary ba sis of his theology, it acquires a slightly dif ferent aspect. What is meant negatively by justification and positively by adoption into sonship is participation in the spiritual na ture of Jesus Christ; it is not some formal preliminary to life in the Spirit. In one sense, even, it is prospective, since, although be lievers are now free from condemnation, this assures them of final acquittal and also in- 44 PAUL AND PAULINISM troduces them to an experience of union with Christ which is not fully realized until the end. While the security of acquittal might be conceived in such a way as to re duce Christ to the level of a mere function ary or executive agent, — a tendency which beset several of the messianic categories, — Paul avoided this unethical abstraction by conceiving justification as an act of grace. The redeeming death of Jesus Christ, which assured Christians of their future and final standing before God, was to him far more than a messianic episode; he saw in it the supreme revelation of God's heart, the sac rifice of his beloved Son, and the free love of the Son himself. Christ had the unshared glory of having not only shared but borne the shame of sinful men. Furthermore, the character of this divine redemption which underlay the experience of the justified and forgiven man involved a similar conception of its aim. Since the sonship of Jesus was 45 PAUL AND PAULINISM one of spirit rather than of vocation, his work for men meant their transformation into his own likeness, the restoration of the divine ideal at the creation. The eternal life, for which justification was the condi tion, was a life of sonship, such as Christ, the firstborn among many brothers, enjoyed with God the Father. To Paul, the term " Son of God," as applied to Jesus, had a richer content than that of "messiah"; it implied the Spirit, and the relation of the Spirit to human faith was deeper than any forensic or juridical categories. The spir itual personality, which was the end of the redeeming purpose, and for which Paul is fond of using the semi-technical termright- eousness, cannot be supposed to originate with any formal verdict or promise of ac quittal on God's part, or with any formal as sent upon man's. The saving faith of Paul's theology had the threeej ements which con stitute any genuine faith. The believing man 46 PAUL AND PAULINISM had to believe certain facts about Jesus, on the witness of historical tradition. Other wise his confession, "Jesus is the Lord or the Christ," would have been meaningless. His faith also was doctrinal or intellectual, in so far as it included an assent to some theoretical explanation of the meaning which attached to Christ's action. Further more and fundamentally, it denoted personal confidence. Of these three elements, that of personal appropriation or trust was the greatest for Paul, though we cannot always understand the scale of relative values which he assigned to them. Where faith seems al most identified with belief or assent, is in his theoretical and polemical exposition of that religious standing which, as a result of Christ's death and resurrection, he already experienced in the freedom and vitality of his personal faith. He seems to have viewed * his faith-mysticism as homogeneous with his juridical view of the atonement, not as 47 PAUL AND PAULINISM an alternative. In any case — and this is of cardinal importance — the former was not a supplement to the latter, which succeeded in getting faith under weigh for the course of the new life. The nexus between the forensic and the ethical aspects must lie somewhere in the faith which affirms the meaning of Christ's death and produces the new freedom. There are three aspects or applications of the Spirit, in Paul's exposition of the Chris tian experience, which may be selected to illustrate how his deeper mind broke through the restrictions of less vital theories upon the nature of faith as determined by the nature of its divine object. () The general religious ideas of Paul : — Weizsacker, The Apostolic Age, vol. i, pp. 79 f . (Lon don : Williams and Norgate, 1894). 75 SELECTED LIST A. Titius, Der Paulinismus unter dem Gesichtspunkt der Seligkeit (Tubingen, 1900). H. Thackeray, Relation of St. Paul to Contemporary Jewish Thought (London, 1900). S. Means, St. Paul and the Anti-Nicene Church (Lon don, 1903). M. Friedlander, Die Religiosen Bewegungen innerhalb des Judentums im Zeitalter Jesu, pp. 342 f. (Berlin, i9°5)- O. Pfleiderer, Primitive Christianity, vol. i, pp. 270 f. (London : Williams and Norgate, 1906). M. Goguel, L'apStre Paul et Jesus Christ (Paris, 1904). W. Wrede, Paulus (Halle a. d. S. 1904; Eng. Tr. Lon don, Philip Green). H. A. A. Kennedy, St. Paul's Conceptions of the Last Things (London, 1904). E. von Dobschutz, Probleme des apostolischen Zeital- ters (Leipzig, 1904). P. Wernle, The Beginnings of Christianity, vol. i, pp. 158 f. (London: Williams and Norgate, 1903). M. Bruckner, Die Entstehung der paulinischen Christo- logie (1903). A. C. McGiffert, The Apostolic Age, pp. 114-150 (Scribner, 1897). P. Gardner, A Historic View of the New Testament, pp. 208 f. (London, popular ed. 1904). Shailer Mathews, The Messianic Hope in the New Testament, pp. 163 f. (Chicago, 1906). A. Meyer, Jesus or Paul (Harper Brothers, 1909). 76 SELECTED LIST J. Weiss, Paul and Jesus (Harper Brothers, 1909). R. Scott, The Pauline Epistles (Edinburgh : T. and T. Clark, 1909). W. Olschewski, Die Wurzeln der paulinischen Ckristo- logie (Konigsberg i. Pr. 1909). (3tf)E Itiber^ibe f>xt$t CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS U . S . A MODERNRELIGIOUS PROBLEMS EDITED BY DR. AMBROSE W. VERNON For a long time there has been an atmosphere of uncertainty in the religious realm. This uncertainty has been caused by the widespread knowledge that modem scholarship has modified the traditional con ceptions of the Christian religion, and particularly by widespread ignorance of the precise modifications to which modem scholarship has been led. The aim of this series of books is to lay before the great body of intelligent people in the English-speak ing world the precise results of this scholarship, so that men both within and without the churches may be able to understand the conception of the Christian religion (and of its Sacred Books) which obtains among its leading scholars to-day, and that they may intelligently cooperate in the great practical problems with which the churches are now confronted. While at many a point divergent views are cham pioned, it has become apparent in the last few years that it is possible to speak of a consensus of opinion among the leading scholars of England and America, who have, in general, adopted the modern point of view. The publishers and editor congratulate themselves that this consensus of opinion may be presented to the public not by middle-men, but by men who from their position and attainment are recognized through out the English Protestant world as among those best able to speak with authority on the most important subjects which face intelligent religious men to-day. It is a notable sign of the times that these eminent specialists have gladly consented to pause in their de tailed research, in order to acquaint the religious public with the results of their study. Modern Religious Problems are many, but they fall chiefly under one of the four divisions into which this series of books is to be divided: — I. The Old Testament. II. The New Testament. III. Fundamental Christian Conceptions. IV. Practical Church Problems. Under these four main divisions the most vital problems will be treated in short, concise, clear vol umes. They will leave technicalities at one side and they will be published at a price which will put the assured results of religious scholarship within the reach of all. The volumes already arranged for are the following: I. OLD TESTAMENT "THE ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE LAW." By Canon S. R. DRIVER, Oxford University. "HOW WE GOT OUR OLD TESTAMENT." By Professor WILLIAM R. ARNOLD, Andover Semin ary. •THE PRIMITIVE RELIGION OF ISRAEL." By Professor L. B. PATON, Hartford Theological Semi_- ' ary. II. NEW TESTAMENT "THE EARLIEST SOURCES FOR THE LIFE OF JESUS." By Professor F. C. BURKITT, Cambridge Unl. versity, England. (Now Ready.) "THE MIRACLES OF JESUS." By Professor F. C. PORTER, Yale University. "THE FOUNDING OF THE CHURCH." By Professor B. W. BACON, Yale University. (Now Ready.) "HOW WE GOT OUR NEW TESTAMENT.* By Professor J. H. ROPES, Harvard University. "PAUL AND PAULINISM." By Rev. JAMES MOFFATT, D. D., Brought? Feny, Forfarshire, Scotland. (Now Ready.) "THE HISTORICAL AND RELIGIOUS VALUE OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL." By Professor E. F. SCOTT, Queen's University, Kingston. (Now Ready.) "THE BIRTH AND RESURRECTION OF OUR LORD." By Professor WILLIAM H. RYDER, of And over Seminary, Cambridge, Mass. III. FUNDAMENTAL CHRISTIAN CONCEPTIONS "THE GOSPEL OF JESUS." By Professor G. W. KNOX, Union Theological Seminary. New York. With General Introduction to the Series. (Now Ready.) "THE GOD OF THE CHRISTIAN." By Professor A. C. McGIFFERT, Union Theological Sem inary. "SIN AND ITS FORGIVENESS." By President WILLIAM DeW. HYDE, Bowdoin College. (Now Ready.) "THE PERSON OF JESUS." By President H. C. KING, Oberlin College. "THE AUTHORITY OF THE SCRIPTURES." By Profes-or SHAILER MATHEWS, University of Chi cago. IV. PRACTICAL CHURCH PROBLEMS "THE PLACE OF THE CHURCH IN MODERN SOCIETY." By WM. JEWETT TUCKER, Ex-fresi- dent of Dartmouth College. "THE CHURCH AND LABOR." By CHARLES STELZLE, Superintendent of Department of the Church and Labor of the Presbyterian Church of the United States. (Now Ready.) "THE ADJUSTMENT OF THE BIBLE SCHOOLS TO MODERN NEEDS." By Professor CHARLES F. KENT, Yale University. "THE CHURCH AND THE CHILD." By Rev. HENRY SLOANE COFFIN, Madison Ave. Presbyterian Church, New York City. "THE PRESENTATION OF RELIGION TO EDU CATED MEN." By Rev. GEORGE HODGES, D. D., Dean of the Episcopal Theological School, Cambridge, Mass. The general editor of the series, Rev. Ambrose White Vernon, is a graduate of Princeton University (1891) and of Union Theological Seminary (1894). After two years more of study in Germany, on a fel lowship, he had an experience of eight years in the pastorate, at Hiawatha, Kansas, and East Orange, New Jersey. From 1904 to 1907 he was professor of Biblical literature in Dartmouth College, and then professor of practical theology at Yale till the present year, when he returned to the pastorate, succeeding the late Dr. Reuen Thomas at Harvard Church, Brookline, one of the leading churches of metropoli tan Boston. Dartmouth College gave him the de gree of D. D. in 1907. The volumes are attractively bound in cloth. Thin zzmo, each jo cents net. Postage j cents. HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 4 Park St., Boston : 85 Fifth Ave., New York YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 3 9002 05046 2580