13 Martineau, Liverpool Controversy: Inconsistency of the Scheme of Vicarious Redemption.
The Eleusinian Mysteries, for instance, were not necessarily any thing intrinsically dark and hard to be comprehended, but things hidden from public gaze and only to be known by initiation into them. Paul uses the term in a similar way to denote the peculiar scheme of grace, which "had been kept secret from the beginning of the world," "hidden from ages and generations, but now made manifest." No one denies that Paul means by "this mystery" the very heart and essence of the gospel, precisely that which distinguishes it from the law and makes it a universal method of salvation, a wondrous system of grace. So much is irresistibly evident from the way and the connection in which he uses the term. He writes thus in explanation of the great mystery as it was dramatically revealed through Christ: "Who was manifested in the flesh, [i. e. seen in the body during his life on earth,] justified in the spirit, [i. e. freed after death from the necessity of imprisonment in Hades,] seen of angels, [i. e. in their fellowship after his resurrection,] preached unto the Gentiles, [i. e. after the gift of tongues on Pentecost day,] believed on in the world, [i. e. his gospel widely accepted through the labors of his disciples,] received up into glory, [i. e. taken into heaven to the presence of God.]" "The revelation of the mystery" means, then, the visible enactment and exhibition, through the resurrection of Christ, of God's free forgiveness of men, redeeming them from the Hadean gloom to the heavenly glory. The word "glory" in the New Testament confessedly often signifies the illumination of heaven, the defined abode of God and his angels. Robinson collects, in his Lexicon, numerous examples wherein he says it means "that state which is the portion of those who dwell with God in heaven." Now, Paul repeatedly speaks of the calling of believers to glory as one of the chief blessings and new prerogatives of the gospel. "Being justified by faith, we rejoice in hope of the glory of God." "Walk worthy of God, who hath called you unto his glory." "We speak wisdom to the initiates, the hidden wisdom of God in a mystery, which before the world [the Jewish dispensation] God ordained for our glory." "Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God: behold, I show you a mystery: we shall all be changed in a moment, and put on immortality." In the first chapter of the letter to the Colossians, Paul speaks of "the hope which is laid up for you in heaven, whereof ye have heard in the gospel;" also of "the inheritance of the saints in light:" then he says, "God would now make known among the Gentiles the mystery, which is, Christ among you, the hope of glory." In the light of what has gone before, how significant and how clear is this declaration! "All have sinned, and failed to attain unto the glory of God; but now, through the faith of Jesus Christ, [through the dispensation brought to light by Christ,] the righteousness of God [God's method of salvation] is unto all that believe." That is, by the law all were shut up in Hades, but by grace they are now ransomed and to be received to heaven. The same thought or scheme is contained in that remarkable passage in the Epistle to the Galatians where Paul says the free Isaac and the bond woman Hagar were an allegory, teaching that there were two covenants, one by Abraham, the other by Moses. The Mosaic covenant of the law "answers to the Jerusalem which is on earth, and is in bondage with her children," and belongs only to the Jews. The Abrahamic covenant of promise answers to "the Jerusalem which is above, and is free, and is the mother of us all." In the former, we were "begotten unto bondage." In the latter, "Christ hath made us free."
We will notice but one more text in passing: it is, of all the proof texts of the doctrine of a substitutional expiation, the one which has ever been regarded as the very Achilles. And yet it can be made to support that doctrine only by the aid of arbitrary assumptions and mistranslations, while by its very terms it perfectly coincides with nay, expressly declares the theory which we have been advocating as the genuine interpretation of Paul. The usual commentators, in their treatment of this passage, have exhibited a long continued series of perversions and sophisms, affording a strong example of unconscious prejudice. The correct Greek reading of the text is justly rendered thus: "Whom God set forth, a mercy seat through the faith in his blood, to exhibit his righteousness through the remission of former sins by the forbearance of God." For rendering [non-ASCII characters] "mercy seat," the usus loquendi and the internal harmony of meaning are in our favor, and also the weight of many orthodox authorities, such as Theodoret, Origen, Theophylact, OEcumenius, Erasmus, Luther, and from Pelagius to Bushnell. Still, we are willing to admit the rendering of it by "sin offering." That makes no important difference in the result. Christ was a sin offering, in the conception of Paul, in this sense: that when he was not himself subject to death, which was the penalty of sin, he yet died in order to show God's purpose of removing that penalty of sin through his resurrection. For rendering [non-ASCII characters] "through," no defence is needed: the only wonder is, how it ever could have been here translated "for." Now, let two or three facts be noticed.
First, the New Testament phrase "the faith of Christ," "the faith of Jesus," is very unfairly and unwarrantably made to mean an internal affection towards Christ, a belief of men in him. Its genuine meaning is the same as "the gospel of Christ," or the religion of Christ, the system of grace which he brought.14 Who can doubt that such is the meaning of the word in these instances? "Contend for the faith once delivered to the saints;" "Greet them that love us in the faith;" "Have not the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ with respect of persons." So, in the text now under our notice, "the faith which is in his blood" means the dispensation of pardon and justification, the system of faith, which was confirmed and exemplified to us in his death and resurrection. Secondly, "the righteousness of God," which is here said to be "pointed out" by Christ's death, denotes simply, in Professor Stuart's words, "God's pardoning mercy," or "acquittal," or "gratuitous justification," "in which sense," he says truly, "it is almost always used in Paul's epistles."15 It signifies neither more nor less than God's method of salvation by freely forgiving sins and treating the sinner as if he were righteous, the method of salvation now carried into effect and revealed in the gospel brought by Christ, and dramatically enacted in his passion and ascension. Furthermore, we ask attention to the fact that the ordinary interpreter, hard pressed by his unscriptural creed, interpolates a disjunctive conjunction in the opposing teeth of Paul's plain statement. Paul says, as the common version has it, God is "just, and [i. e. even] the justifier." The creed bound commentators read it,
14 Robinson has gathered a great number of instances in his Lexicon, under the word "Faith," wherein it can only mean, as he says, "the system of Christian doctrines, the gospel."
15 Stuart's Romans i. 17, iii. 25, 26, &c.
"just and yet the justifier." We will now present the true meaning of the whole passage, in our view of it, according to Paul's own use of language. To establish a conviction of the correctness of the exposition, we only ask the ingenuous reader carefully to study the clauses of the Greek text and recollect the foregoing data. "God has set Christ forth, to be to us a sure sign that we have been forgiven and redeemed through the faith that was proved by his triumphant return from death, the dispensation of grace inaugurated by him. Herein God has exhibited his method of saving sinners, which is by the free remission of their sins through his kindness. Thus God is proved to be disposed to save, and to be saving, by the system of grace shown through Jesus, him that believeth." In consequence of sin, men were under sentence of condemnation to the under world. In the fulness of time God fulfilled his ancient promise to Abraham. He freely justified men, that is, forgave them, redeemed them from their doom, and would soon open the sky for their abode with him. This scheme of redemption was carried out by Christ. That is to say, God proclaimed it to men, and asked their belief in it, by "setting forth Christ" to die, descend among the dead, rise thence, and ascend into heaven, as an exemplifying certification of the truth of the glad tidings.
Thirdly, Paul teaches that one aim of Christ's mission was to purify, animate, and exalt the moral characters of men, and rectify their conduct, to produce a subjective sanctification in them, and so prepare them for judgment and fit them for heaven. The establishment of this proposition will conclude the present part of our subject. He writes, "Our Saviour, Jesus Christ, gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity and purify unto himself a peculiar people zealous of good works." "Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity." In various ways he often represents the fact that believers have been saved by grace through Christ as the very reason, the intensified motive, why they should scrupulously keep every tittle of the moral law and abstain even from the appearance of evil, walking worthy of their high vocation. "The grace of God that bringeth salvation to all men hath appeared, teaching us that, denying all ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world." Bad men, "that obey not the gospel of Christ," such characters as "thieves, extortioners, drunkards, adulterers, shall not inherit the kingdom of God." He proclaims, in unmistakable terms, "God will render to every man according to his deeds, wrath and tribulation to the evil doer, honor and peace to the well doer, whether Jew or Gentile." The conclusion to be drawn from these and other like declarations is unavoidable. It is that "every one, Jew and Gentile, shall stand before the judgment seat of Christ and receive according to the deeds done in the body; for there is no respect of persons." And one part of Christ's mission was to exert a hallowing moral influence on men, to make them righteous, that they might pass the bar with acquittal. But the reader who recollects the class of texts adduced a little while since will remember that an opposite conclusion was as unequivocally drawn from them. Then Paul said, "By faith ye are justified, without the deeds of the law." Now he says, "For not the hearers of the law are just before God, but the doers of the law shall be justified in the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ." Is there a contradiction, then, in Paul? Only in appearance. Let us distinguish and explain. In the two quotations above, the apostle is referring to two different things.
First, he would say, By the faith of Christ, the free grace of God declared in the gospel of Christ, ye are justified, gratuitously delivered from that necessity of imprisonment in Hades which is the penalty of sin doomed upon the whole race from Adam, and from which no amount of personal virtue could avail to save men. Secondly, when he exclaims, "Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God?" his thought is of a spiritual qualification of character, indispensable for positive admission among the blest in heaven. That is to say, the impartial penalty of primeval sin consigned all men to Hades. They could not by their own efforts escape thence and win heaven. That fated inability God has removed, and through Christ revealed its removal; but, that one should actually obtain the offered and possible prize of heaven, personal purity, faith, obedience, holiness, are necessary. In Paul's conception of the scheme of Christian salvation, then, there were two distinct parts: one, what God had done for all; the other, what each man was to do for himself. And the two great classes of seemingly hostile texts filling his epistles, which have puzzled so many readers, become clear and harmonious when we perceive and remember that by "righteousness" and its kindred terms he sometimes means the external and fulfilled method of redeeming men from the transmitted necessity of bondage in the under world, and sometimes means the internal and contingent qualifications for actually realizing that redemption. In the former instance he refers to the objective mode of salvation and the revelation of it in Christ. In the latter, he refers to the subjective fitness for that salvation and the certitude of it in the believer. So, too, the words "death" and "life," in Paul's writings, are generally charged, by a constructio proegnans, with a double sense, one spiritual, individual, contingent, the other mechanical, common, absolute. Death, in its full Pauline force, includes inward guilt, condemnation, and misery, and outward descent into the under world. Life, in its full Pauline force, includes inward rectitude, peace, and joy, and outward ascent into the upper world. Holiness is necessary, "for without it no one can see the Lord;" yet by itself it can secure only inward life: it is ineffectual to win heaven. Grace by itself merely exempts from the fatality of the condemnation to Hades: it offers eternal life in heaven only upon condition of "patient continuance in well doing" by "faith, obedience to the truth, and sanctification of the spirit." But God's free grace and man's diligent fidelity, combined, give the full fruition of blessedness in the heart and of glory and immortality in the sky.
Such, as we have set forth in the foregoing three divisions, was Paul's view of the mission of Christ and of the method of salvation. It has been for centuries perverted and mutilated. The toil now is by unprejudiced inspection to bring it forward in its genuine completeness, as it stood in Paul's own mind and in the minds of his contemporaries. The essential view, epitomized in a single sentence, is this. The independent grace of God has interfered, first, to save man from Hades, and secondly, to enable him, by the co operation of his own virtue, to get to heaven. Here are two separate means conjoined to effect the end, salvation. Now, compare, in the light of this statement, the three great theological theories of Christendom. The UNITARIAN, overlooking the objective justification, or offered redemption from the death realm to the sky home, which whether it be a truth or an error is surely in the epistles, makes the subjective sanctification all in all. The CALVINIST, in his theory, comparatively scorns the subjective sanctification, which Paul insists on as a necessity for entering the kingdom of God, and, having perverted the objective justification from its real historic meaning, exaggerates it into the all in all. The ROMAN CATHOLIC holds that Christ simply removed the load of original sin and its entailed doom, and left each person to stand or fall by his own merits, in the helping communion of the Church. He also maintains that a part of Christ's office was to exert an influence for the moral improvement and consecration of human character. His error, as an interpreter of Paul's thought, is, that he, like the Calvinist, attributes to Christ's death a vicarious efficacy by suffering the pangs of mankind's guilt to buy their ransom from the inexorable justice of God; whereas the apostle really represents Christ's redeeming mission as consisting simply in a dramatic exemplification of the Father's spontaneous love and purpose to pardon past offences, unbolt the gates of Hades, and receive the worthy to heaven. Moreover, while Paul describes the heavenly salvation as an undeserved gift from the grace of God, the Catholic often seems to make it a prize to be earned, under the Christian dispensation, by good works which may fairly challenge that reward. However, we have little doubt that this apparent opposition is rather in the practical mode of exhortation than in any interior difference of dogma; for Paul himself makes personal salvation hinge on personal conditions, the province of grace being seen in the new extension to man of the opportunity and invitation to secure his own acceptance. And so the Roman Catholic exposition of Paul's doctrine is much more nearly correct than any other interpretation now prevalent. We should expect, a priori, that it would be, since that Church, containing two thirds of Christendom, is the most intimately connected, by its scholars, members, and traditions, with the apostolic age.