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

by Matthew Arnold

I.

M. Renan sums up his interesting volume on St. Paul by saying:—'After having been for three hundred years, thanks to Protestantism, the Christian doctor par excellence, Paul is now coming to an end of his reign.' All through his book M. Renan is possessed with a sense of this close relationship between St. Paul and Protestantism. Protestantism has made Paul, he says; Pauline doctrine is identified with Protestant doctrine; Paul is a Protestant doctor, and the counterpart of Luther. M. Renan has a strong distaste for Protestantism, and this distaste extends itself to the Protestant Paul. The reign of this Protestant is now coming to an end, and such a consummation evidently has M. Renan's approval.

St. Paul is now coming to an end of his reign. Precisely the contrary, I venture to think, is the judgment to which a true criticism of men and of things, in our own country at any rate, leads us. The Protestantism which has so used and abused St. Paul is coming to an end; its organisations, strong and active as they look, are touched with the finger of death; its fundamental ideas, sounding forth still every week from thousands of pulpits, have in them no significance and no power for the progressive thought of humanity. But the reign of the real St. Paul is only beginning; his fundamental ideas, disengaged from the elaborate misconceptions with which Protestantism has overlaid them, will have an influence in the future greater than any which they have yet had,—an influence proportioned to their correspondence with a number of the deepest and most permanent facts of human nature itself.

Elsewhere[16] I have pointed out how, for us in this country, Puritanism is the strong and special representative of Protestantism. The Church of England existed before Protestantism, and contains much besides Protestantism. Remove the schemes of doctrine, Calvinistic or Arminian, which for Protestantism, merely as such, have made the very substance of its religion, and all that is most valuable in the Church of England would still remain. These schemes, or the ideas out of which they spring, show themselves in the Prayer Book; but they are not what gives the Prayer Book its importance and value. But Puritanism exists for the sake of these schemes; its organisations are inventions for enforcing them more purely and thoroughly. Questions of discipline and ceremonies have, originally at least, been always admitted to be in themselves secondary; it is because that conception of the ways of God to man which Puritanism has formed for itself appeared to Puritanism superlatively true and precious, that Independents and Baptists and Methodists in England, and Presbyterians in Scotland, have been impelled to constitute for inculcating it a church-order where it might be less swamped by the additions and ceremonies of men, might be more simply and effectively enounced, and might stand more absolute and central, than in the church-order of Anglicans or Roman Catholics.

Of that conception the cardinal points are fixed by the terms election and justification. These terms come from the writings of St. Paul, and the scheme which Puritanism has constructed with them professes to be St. Paul's scheme. The same scheme, or something very like it, has been, and still is, embraced by many adherents of the Churches of England and Rome; but these Churches rest their claims to men's interest and attachment not on the possession of such a scheme, but on other grounds with which we have for the present nothing to do. Puritanism's very reason for existing depends on the worth of this its vital conception, derived from St. Paul's writings; and when we are told that St. Paul is a Protestant doctor whose reign is ending, a Puritan, keen, pugnacious, and sophisticating simple religion of the heart into complicated theories of the brain about election and justification, we in England, at any rate, can best try the assertion by fixing our eyes on our own Puritans, and comparing their doctrine and their hold on vital truth with St. Paul's.

This we propose now to do, and, indeed, to do it will only be to complete what we have already begun. For already, when we were speaking of Hebraism and Hellenism,[17] we were led to remark how the over-Hebraising of Puritanism, and its want of a wide culture, do so narrow its range and impair its vision that even the documents which it thinks all-sufficient, and to the study of which it exclusively rivets itself, it does not rightly understand, but is apt to make of them something quite different from what they really are. In short, no man, we said, who knows nothing else, knows even his Bible. And we showed how readers of the Bible attached to essential words and ideas of the Bible a sense which was not the writer's; and in particular how this had happened with regard to the Pauline doctrine of resurrection. Let us take the present opportunity of going further in the same road; and instead of lightly disparaging the great name of St. Paul, let us see if the needful thing is not rather to rescue St. Paul and the Bible from the perversions of them by mistaken men.

So long as the well-known habit, on which we have so often enlarged, prevails amongst our countrymen, of holding mechanically their ideas themselves, but making it their chief aim to work with energy and enthusiasm for the organisations which profess those ideas, English Puritanism is not likely to make such a return upon its own thoughts, and upon the elements of its being, as to accomplish for itself an operation of the kind needed; though it has men whose natural faculties, were they but free to use them, would undoubtedly prove equal to the task. The same habit prevents our Puritans from being reached by philosophical works, which exist in sufficient numbers and of which M. Reuss's history of the growth of Christian theology[18] is an admirable specimen,—works where the entire scheme of Pauline doctrine is laid out with careful research and impartial accuracy. To give effect to the predominant points in Paul's teaching, and to exhibit these in so plain and popular a manner as to invite and almost compel men's comprehension, is not the design of such works; and only by writings with this design in view will English Puritanism be reached.

Our one qualification for the business in hand lies in that belief of ours, so much contested by our countrymen, of the primary needfulness of seeing things as they really are, and of the greater importance of ideas than of the machinery which exists for them. If by means of letting our consciousness work quite freely, and by following the methods of studying and judging thence generated, we are shown that we ought in real truth neither to abase St. Paul and Puritanism together, as M. Renan does, nor to abase St. Paul but exalt Puritanism, nor yet to exalt both Puritanism and St. Paul together, but rather to abase Puritanism and exalt St. Paul, then we cannot but think that even for Puritanism itself, also, it will be the best, however unpalatable, to be shown this. Puritanism certainly wishes well to St. Paul; it cannot wish to compromise him by an unintelligent adhesion to him and a blind adoption of his words, instead of being a true child to him. Yet this is what it has really done. What in St. Paul is secondary and subordinate, Puritanism has made primary and essential; what in St Paul is figure and belongs to the sphere of feeling, Puritanism has transported into the sphere of intellect and made formula. On the other hand, what is with St. Paul primary, Puritanism has treated as subordinate: and what is with him thesis, and belonging (so far as anything in religion can properly be said thus to belong) to the sphere of intellect, Puritanism has made image and figure.

And first let us premise what we mean in this matter by primary and secondary, essential and subordinate. We mean, so far as the apostle is concerned, a greater or less approach to what really characterises him and gives his teaching its originality and power. We mean, so far as truth is concerned, a greater or less agreement with facts which can be verified, and a greater or less power of explaining them. What essentially characterises a religious teacher, and gives him his permanent worth and vitality, is, after all, just the scientific value of his teaching, its correspondence with important facts, and the light it throws on them. Never was the truth of this so evident as now. The scientific sense in man never asserted its claim so strongly; the propensity of religion to neglect those claims, and the peril and loss to it from neglecting them, never were so manifest. The license of affirmation about God and his proceedings, in which the religious world indulge, is more and more met by the demand for verification. When Calvinism tells us: 'It is agreed between God and the Mediator Jesus Christ, the Son of God, surety for the redeemed, as parties-contractors, that the sins of the redeemed should be imputed to innocent Christ, and he both condemned and put to death for them, upon this very condition, that whosoever heartily consents unto the covenant of reconciliation offered through Christ, shall, by the imputation of his obedience unto them, be justified and holden righteous before God;'—when Calvinism tells us this, is it not talking about God just as if he were a man in the next street, whose proceedings Calvinism intimately knew and could give account of, could verify that account at any moment, and enable us to verify it also? It is true, when the scientific sense in us, the sense which seeks exact knowledge, calls for that verification, Calvinism refers us to St. Paul, from whom it professes to have got this history of what it calls 'the covenant of redemption.' But this is only pushing the difficulty a stage further back. For if it is St. Paul, and not Calvinism, that professes this exact acquaintance with God and his doings, the scientific sense calls upon St. Paul to produce the facts by which he verifies what he says; and if he cannot produce them, then it treats both St. Paul's assertion, and Calvinism's assertion after him, as of no real consequence.

No one will deny that such is the behaviour of science towards religion in our day, though many may deplore it. And it is not that the scientific sense in us denies the rights of the poetic sense, which employs a figured and imaginative language. But the language we have just been quoting is not figurative and poetic language, it is scholastic and scientific language. Assertions in scientific language must stand the tests of scientific examination. Neither is it that the scientific sense in us refuses to admit willingly and reverently the name of God, as a point in which the religious and the scientific sense may meet, as the least inadequate name for that universal order which the intellect feels after as a law, and the heart feels after as a benefit. 'We, too,' might the men of science with truth say to the men of religion—'we, too, would gladly say God, if only, the moment one says God, you would not pester one with your pretensions of knowing all about him.' That stream of tendency by which all things strive to fulfil the law of their being, and which, inasmuch as our idea of real welfare resolves itself into this fulfilment of the law of one's being, man rightly deems the fountain of all goodness, and calls by the worthiest and most solemn name he can, which is God, science also might willingly own for the fountain of all goodness, and call God. But however much more than this the heart may with propriety put into its language respecting God, this is as much as science can with strictness put there. Therefore, when the religious world, following its bent of trying to describe what it loves, amplifying and again amplifying its description, and guarding finally this amplified description by the most precise and rigid terms it can find, comes at last, with the best intentions, to the notion of a sort of magnified and non-natural man, who proceeds in the fashion laid down in the Calvinistic thesis we have quoted, then science strikes in, remarks the difference between this second notion and the notion it originally admitted, and demands to have the new notion verified, as the first can be verified, by facts. But this does not unsettle the first notion, or prevent science from acknowledging the importance and the scientific validity of propositions which are grounded upon the first notion, and shed light over it.