St. Paul and Protestantism, with an Essay on Puritanism and the Church of England

by Matthew Arnold

The first chapter is to the Gentiles. Its purport is: You have not righteousness. The second is to the Jews; and its purport is: No more have you, though you think you have. The third chapter announces faith in Christ as the one source of righteousness for all men. The fourth chapter gives to the notion of righteousness through faith the sanction of the Old Testament and of the history of Abraham. The fifth insists on the causes for thankfulness and exultation in the boon of righteousness through faith in Christ; and applies illustratively, with this design, the history of Adam. The sixth chapter comes to the all-important question: 'What is that faith in Christ which I, Paul, mean?'—and answers it. The seventh illustrates and explains the answer. But the eighth, down to the end of the twenty-eighth verse, develops and completes the answer. The rest of the eighth chapter expresses the sense of safety and gratitude which the solution is fitted to inspire. The ninth, tenth, and eleventh chapters uphold the second chapter's thesis,—so hard to a Jew, so easy to us,—that righteousness is not by the Jewish law; but dwell with hope and joy on a final result of things which is to be favourable to Israel.

We shall be pardoned this somewhat formal analysis in consideration of the clearness with which it enables us to survey the Puritan scheme of original sin, predestination, and justification. The historical transgression of Adam occupies, it will be observed, in Paul's ideas by no means the primary, fundamental, all-important place which it holds in the ideas of Puritanism. 'This' (the transgression of Adam) 'is our original sin, the bitter root of all our actual transgressions in thought, word, and deed.' Ah, no! Paul did not go to the Book of Genesis to get the real testimony about sin. He went to experience for it. 'I see,' he says, 'a law in my members fighting against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity.'[79] This is the essential testimony respecting the rise of sin to Paul,—this rise of it in his own heart and in the heart of all the men who hear him. At quite a later stage in his conception of the religious life, in quite a subordinate capacity, and for the mere purpose of illustration, comes in the allusion to Adam and to what is called original sin. Paul's desire for righteousness has carried him to Christ and to the conception of the righteousness which is of God by faith, and he is expressing his gratitude, delight, wonder, at the boon he has discovered. For the purpose of exalting it he reverts to the well-known story of Adam. It cannot even be said that Paul Judaises in his use here of this story; so entirely does he subordinate it to his purpose of illustration, using it just as he might have used it had he believed, which undoubtedly he did not, that it was merely a symbolical legend, having the advantage of being perfectly familiar to himself and his hearers. 'Think,' he says, 'how in Adam's fall one man's one transgression involved all men in punishment; then estimate the blessedness of our boon in Christ, where one man's one righteousness involves a world of transgressors in blessing![80] This is not a scientific doctrine of corruption inherited through Adam's fall; it is a rhetorical use of Adam's fall in a passing allusion to it.

We come to predestination. We have seen how strong was Paul's consciousness of that power, not ourselves, in which we live and move and have our being. The sense of life, peace, and joy, which comes through identification with Christ, brings with it a deep and grateful consciousness that this sense is none of our own getting and making. No, it is grace, it is the free gift of God, who gives abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, and calls things that are not as though they were. 'It is not of him that willeth or of him that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy.'[81] As moral agents, for whom alone exist all the predicaments of merit and demerit, praise and blame, effort and failure, vice and virtue, we are impotent and lost;—we are saved through that in us which is passive and involuntary; we are saved through our affections, it is as beings acted upon and influenced that we are saved! Well might Paul cry out, as this mystical but profound and beneficent conception filled his soul: 'All things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.'[82] Well might he say, in the gratitude which cannot find words enough to express its sense of boundless favour, that those who reached peace with God through identification with Christ were vessels of mercy, marked from endless ages; that they had been foreknown, predestinated, called, justified, glorified.

It may be regretted, for the sake of the clear understanding of his essential doctrine, that Paul did not stop here. It might seem as if the word 'prothesis,' purpose, lured him on into speculative mazes, and involved him, at last, in an embarrassment, from which he impatiently tore himself by the harsh and unedifying image of the clay and the potter. But this is not so. These allurements of speculation, which have been fatal to so many of his interpreters, never mastered Paul. He was led into difficulty by the tendency which we have already noticed as making his real imperfection both as a thinker and as a writer,—the tendency to Judaise.

Already, in the fourth chapter, this tendency had led him to seem to rest his doctrine of justification by faith upon the case of Abraham, whereas, in truth, it needs all the good will in the world, and some effort of ingenuity, even to bring the case of Abraham within the operation of this doctrine. That righteousness is life, that all men by themselves fail of righteousness, that only through identification with Jesus Christ can they reach it,—these propositions, for us at any rate, prove themselves much better than they are proved by the thesis that Abraham in old age believed God's promise that his seed should yet be as the stars for multitude, and that this was counted to him for righteousness. The sanction thus apparently given to the idea that faith is a mere belief, or opinion of the mind, has put thousands of Paul's readers on a false track.

But Paul's Judaising did not end here. To establish his doctrine of righteousness by faith, he had to eradicate the notion that his people were specially privileged, and that, having the Mosaic law, they did not need anything farther. For us, this one verse of the tenth chapter: There is no difference between Jew and Greek, for it is the same Lord of all, who is rich to all that call upon him,—and these four words of another verse: For righteousness, heart-faith necessary!—effect far more for Paul's object than his three chapters bristling with Old Testament quotations. By quotation, however, he was to proceed, in order to invest his doctrine with the talismanic virtues of a verbal sanction from the law and the prophets. He shows, therefore, that the law and the prophets had said that only a remnant, an elect remnant, of Israel should be saved, and that the rest should be blinded. But to say that peace with God through Jesus Christ inspires such an abounding sense of gratitude, and of its not being our work, that we can only speak of ourselves as called and chosen to it, is one thing; in so speaking, we are on the ground of personal experience. To say, on the other hand, that God has blinded and reprobated other men, so that they shall not reach this blessing, is to quit the ground of personal experience, and to begin employing the magnified and non-natural man in the next street. We then require, in order to account for his proceedings, such an analogy as that of the clay and the potter.

This is Calvinism, and St. Paul undoubtedly falls into it. But the important thing to remark is, that this Calvinism, which with the Calvinist is primary, is with Paul secondary, or even less than secondary. What with Calvinists is their fundamental idea, the centre of their theology, is for Paul an idea added to his central ideas, and extraneous to them; brought in incidentally, and due to the necessities of a bad mode of recommending and enforcing his thesis. It is as if Newton had introduced into his exposition of the law of gravitation an incidental remark, perhaps erroneous, about light or colours; and we were then to make this remark the head and front of Newton's law. The theological idea of reprobation was an idea of Jewish theology as of ours, an idea familiar to Paul and a part of his training, an idea which probably he never consciously abandoned. But its complete secondariness in him is clearly established by other considerations than those which we have drawn from the place and manner of his introduction of it. The very phrase about the clay and the potter is not Paul's own; he does but repeat a stock theological figure. Isaiah had said: 'O Lord, we are the clay, and thou our potter, and we are all the work of thy hand.'[83] Jeremiah had said, in the Lord's name, to Israel: 'Behold, as the clay in the potter's hand, so are ye in mine hand, O house of Israel.'[84] And the son of Sirach comes yet nearer to Paul's very words: 'As the clay is in the potter's hand to fashion it at his pleasure, so man is in the hand of him that made him, to render to them as liketh him best.'[85] Is an original man's essential, characteristic idea, that which he adopts thus bodily from some one else? But take Paul's truly essential idea. 'We are buried with Christ through baptism into death, that like as he was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also shall walk in newness of life.'[86] Did Jeremiah say that? Is any one the author of it except Paul? Then there should Calvinism have looked for Paul's secret, and not in the commonplace about the potter and the vessels of wrath. A commonplace which is so entirely a commonplace to him, that he contradicts it even while he is Judaising; for in the very batch of chapters we are discussing he says: 'Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.'[87] Still more clear is, on this point, his real mind, when he is not Judaising: 'God is the saviour of all men, specially of those that believe.'[88] And anything, finally, which might seem dangerous in the grateful sense of a calling, choosing, and leading by eternal goodness,—a notion as natural as the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination is monstrous,—Paul abundantly supplies in more than one striking passage; as, for instance, in that incomparable third chapter of the Philippians (from which, and from the sixth and eighth chapters of the Romans, Paul's whole theology, if all his other writings were lost, might be reconstructed), where he expresses his humble consciousness that the mystical resurrection which is his aim, glory, and salvation, he does not yet, and cannot, completely attain.

The grand doctrine, then, which Calvinistic Puritanism has gathered from Paul, turns out to be a secondary notion of his, which he himself, too, has contradicted or corrected. But, at any rate, 'Christ meritoriously obtained eternal redemption for us.' 'If there be anything,' the quarterly organ of Puritanism has lately told us in its hundredth number, 'that human experience has made certain, it is that man can never outgrow his necessity for the great truths and provisions of the Incarnation and the sacrificial Atonement of the Divine Son of God.' God, his justice being satisfied by Christ's bearing according to compact our guilt and dying in our stead, is appeased and set free to exercise towards us his mercy, and to justify and sanctify us in consideration of Christ's righteousness imputed to us, if we give our hearty belief and consent to the satisfaction thus made. This hearty belief being given, 'we rest,' to use the consecrated expression already quoted, 'in the finished work of a Saviour.' This doctrine of imputed righteousness is now, as predestination formerly was, the favourite thesis of popular Protestant theology. And, like the doctrine of predestination, it professes to be specially derived from St. Paul.

But whoever has followed attentively the main line of St. Paul's theology, as we have tried to show it, will see at once that in St. Paul's essential ideas this popular notion of a substitution, and appeasement, and imputation of alien merit, has no place. Paul knows nothing of a sacrificial atonement; what Paul knows of is a reconciling sacrifice. The true substitution, for Paul, is not the substitution of Jesus Christ in men's stead as victim on the cross to God's offended justice; it is the substitution by which the believer, in his own person, repeats Jesus Christ's dying to sin. Paul says, in real truth, to our Puritans with their magical and mechanical salvation, just what he said to the men of circumcision: 'If I preach resting in the finished work of a Saviour, why am I yet persecuted? why do I die daily? then is the stumbling-block of the cross annulled.'[89] That hard, that well-nigh impossible doctrine, that our whole course must be a crucifixion and a resurrection, even as Christ's whole course was a crucifixion and a resurrection, becomes superfluous. Yet this is my central doctrine.'

The notion of God as a magnified and non-natural man, appeased by a sacrifice and remitting in consideration of it his wrath against those who had offended him,—this notion of God, which science repels, was equally repelled, in spite of all that his nation, time, and training had in them to favour it, by the profound religious sense of Paul. In none of his epistles is the reconciling work of Christ really presented under this aspect. One great epistle there is, however, which does apparently present it under this aspect,—the Epistle to the Hebrews.