out the theory of his new position. He withdrew to some
secluded spot in the region south of Damascus, then vaguely
called Arabia (Gal. i. 17). Chief among the problems pressing
The New Theory
of the Law.
for reinterpretation in the light of his recent experience
was the place of the Law in God’s counsels.
While the Law could condemn, warn and in some
degrees restrain the sinner from overt sins, it could
not redeem or save him from the love of sin. In a word, it
could not “give life” (Gal. iii. 21). Hence its direct remedial
action was quite secondary. Its primary effect, and therefore
divine purpose, was to drive men humbly to seek God’s grace.
It “shut up all unto (realized) disobedience, that God might
have mercy upon all” (Rom. xi. 32; Gal. iii. 22). Thus the
place of the Law in God’s counsels was episodic. The radical
egoism of the natural man could be transcended, and self-glorying
excluded, not by the law, with its “law (principle)
of works,” but by the “law of faith” (Rom. iii. 27). In fine,
the function of the Law was secondary, preparatory, temporary.
The reign of the Law closed when its work in shutting up men
to faith in Christ—the perfect form of faith, that of conscious
sonship—was accomplished. It had a high place of honour
as a dispensation for a limited end and time; but its day was
over when Jesus accepted crucifixion at its hands, and so passed
on as the inaugurator of a new dispensation marked by a final
relation between man and God, the filial, the Spirit of which
was already in the hearts of all Christian believers (Gal. iii.
23-iv. 7). Thus the Cross of Jesus was the satisfaction of the
claims of Law as a dispensation or divinely sanctioned method,
which had to be honoured even in the act of being transcended,
“that God might be just (i.e. dispensationally consistent),
while justifying the believer in Jesus” on a fresh basis (Rom.
iii. 26). Such a view did but “establish the Law” (v. 31)
within its own proper sphere, while pointing beyond it to one
in which its final aim found fulfilment.
Here lay the revolutionary element in Paul’s thought in relation to Judaism, turning the latter “upside down” and marking his gospel off from the form in which Judaeo-Christians had hitherto apprehended the salvation in Jesus the Christ. It was the result of profound insight, and, historically, it saved Christianity from being a Its Universal Value. mere Jewish sect. But as it was conditioned by recoil from an overdriven use of the Law in the circles in which Saul was trained, so there was something one-sided in its emphasis on the pathological workings of the Law upon human nature in virtue of sinful egoism. Saul was the pioneer who secured mankind for ever against bondage to religious legalism. He it was who first detected that specific virus generated by Law in the “natural man,” and also discovered the sovereign antidote provided in Christ. Nor is it as though Paul, even in those apologetic writings which present his antitheses to Law in the sharpest form, had the Jewish Thorah exclusively in view. He deals with it rather as the classic type of law in religion: it is really law qua law, even the unwritten law in conscience, as determining man’s relations to God, that he has in mind in his psychological criticism of its tendencies in the human soul (see Sanday and Headlam, on Rom. ii. 12 seq.): “Nitimur in vetitum cupimusque negata.” This is too often overlooked by his Jewish critics. Paul felt nothing but reverence for the Thorah in what he took to be its proper place, as secondary to faith and subordinate to Christ. In short, Paul first perceived and set forth the principle of inspiration to God-likeness by a personal ideal in place of obedience to an impersonal Law, as condition of salvation. The former includes the latter, while safeguarding the filial quality of religious obedience.
The above seems to meet part of the criticism directed by modern Jews against Paul’s theory of the Law. Other criticisms (cf. C. G. Montefiore, Jewish Quarterly Review, vi. 428–474, xiii. 161–217) may just be noted. If Paul supports his theory by bad Scripture exegesis, that is a common Rabbinic failing. If it be said that it is monstrous to hold that God gave the Law mainly for another end than the ostensible one, viz. to lead to life by obedience, this holds so far; but one cannot exclude from the divine purpose the negative effect, viz. promotion of self-knowledge in sinful man and the breaking down of his self-confidence, conditions essential to a mature filial relation between man and God. Nor did Paul deny the positive or directly beneficent, though limited, function of the Law, so far as it was viewed in the light of the grace of God, as by prophets, psalmists, and others who “walked humbly with God,” not as meriting His approval as of right by “works of law.” But, objects the modern Jew, the notion of Rabbinic Judaism as generally tainted by “legalism” in any such sense, is a mere figment of Paul’s. Nevertheless it is unproven and improbable that Paul unfairly represents the prevailing tendency in the Pharisaic Judaism of his own day as “legalistic” in the bad sense. He is really the one extant witness upon the point, as just defined, if we except certain apocalyptic writings (whose evidence modern Jews are anxious to discount), like the Apocalypse of Baruch and 4 Ezra, the latter of which suggests that already the humbling effect of the capture of Jerusalem was being felt. Finally the same liberal Jew who complains that Paul turns Judaism “upside down” by his doctrine of the Law, cites with approval his words, “There is no distinction between Jew and Greek,” and adds, “Not till St Paul had written did the prophetic universalism attain its goal.” Surely there is a vital connexion between these two things. “Universalism” was the true issue of the higher tendency in Hebraism, as seen in certain of Israel’s prophets. But it was attained only through Jesus of Nazareth; and historically the main link between His supra-legal universalism and its actual outcome in the Christian Church was the ex-Pharisee Saul, with his anti-legal gospel.
Saul’s conversion left Jesus the Christ as central to his new world as the Law had been to his old. All was summed up in Christ, and Him crucified. This was to him the essence of Christianity as distinct from Judaism. As, to the Jew, life was lived under the Law or in it as native element, so the Christian life was “in Christ” as The Christ of Paul. element and law of being. Christ simply replaced the Law as form and medium of relations between God and man. In this Paul went far beyond the older apostles, whose simpler attitude to the Law had never suggested the problem of its dispensational relation to Messiah, though in fact they relied on Messiah alone for justification before God. The logic of this, as Paul later urged it on Peter of Antioch (Gal. ii. 15 sqq.), they did not yet perceive. To him it was clear from the first. But the contrast goes farther. The very form in which Jesus was known to Saul by direct experience, namely, as a spiritual being, in a body already glorified in virtue of a regnant “spirit of holiness”—revealed by the Resurrection as the essence of His personality (Rom. i. 4)—determined all his thought about Him. To this even Jesus’ earthly life, real as it was, was subordinate. Paul was not indifferent to Jesus’ words and deeds, as helping to bring home in detail the spirit of Him who by resurrection was revealed as the Son of God; but apart from insight into His redemptive work, knowledge of these things was of little religious moment. The extent of Paul’s knowledge of the historical Jesus has been much debated. Few think that he had seen Jesus in the flesh; some even deny that he knew or cared for more than the bare facts to which he alludes in his epistles—the Davidic birth, the institution of the Supper, the Death and Resurrection. But beyond his express appeals to precepts of “the Lord” in 1 Cor. vii. 10, ix. 14 (cf. Rom. xii. 14), he “shows a marked insight into the character of Jesus as it is described in the Gospels” (see 2 Cor. x. 1; cf. Phil. ii. 5–8). The sources of such knowledge were no doubt oral, e.g. Peter (Gal. i. 18), Barnabas, Mark, as well as collections of Jesus’ words, along with connected incidents in His life, used in catechesis. Thus Saul’s attitude to Jesus was fixed by his own experience. The His Theology Rooted in Experience. varied theoretic expressions found in his writings as to Christ’s relations to God, to mankind, and even to the universe, were to him but corollaries of this. The most persistent element in his conception of Christ’s person, viz. as a heavenly being, who, though God’s Son, voluntarily humbled Himself and suffered in fulfilment of God’s will, and had in consequence been exalted to fresh glory, took its start from his own personal experience, although it included the speculative postulate of pre-existence in terms of some current Messianic form of thought. Paul’s theory expressed the deeper sense of the all-inclusive significance of Christ, in keeping with his own experience. Hence, too, all his distinctive thoughts on religion, sometimes called
