The life and work of St. Paul

EPISTLE TO THE EOMANS, AND THEOLOGY OP ST. PAUL. 455
enunciated in the first eight chapters, he goes too far in calling them the heart
and pith of the whole, to which everything else is only an addition. These
chapters may have been first in the order of thought, without being first
in the order of importance ; they may have formed the original motive of the
Epistle, and yet may have been completely thrown into subordination by the
grandeur of the conceptions to which they led.
May we not well suppose that the Epistle originated as follows P
Apostle, intending
The
to start for Jerusalem, and afterwards to open a new
mission in the West, thought that he would utilise an interval of calm
by writing to the Roman Church, in which, though not founded by himself, he
could not but feel the deepest interest. He knows that, whatever might be
the number of the Gentile Christians, the nucleus of the Church had been
composed of Jews and proselytes, who would find it very hard to accept the
lesson that God was no respecter of persons. Yet this was the truth which
he was commissioned to teach ; and if the Jews could not receive it without a
shock if even the most thoughtful among them could not but find it hard to
admit that their promised Messiah the Messiah for whom they had yearned
through afflicted centuries was after all to be even more the Messiah of the
Gentiles than of the Jews then it was pre-eminently necessary for him to set
this truth so clearly, and yet so sympathetically, before them, as to soften the
inevitable blow to their deepest prejudices. It was all the more necessary
because, in writing to the more liberal Judaisers, he had not to deal with the
ignorant malignity of those who had seduced his simple Galatians. In
writing to the Churches of Galatia, and smiting down with one shattering
blow their serpent-head of Pharisaism, he had freed his soul from the storm
of passion by which it had been shaken. He could now write with perfect
composure on the larger questions of the position of the Christian in reference
to the Law, and of the relations of Judaism to Heathenism, and of both
to Christianity. That the Gentiles were in no respect inferior to the Jews in
spiritual privileges nay, more, that the Gentiles were actually superseding
the Jews by pressing with more eagerness into the Church of Christ 1 was a
fact which no Jewish Christian could overlook. Was God, then, rejecting
Israel ? The central section of the Epistle (ix. xi.) deals with this grave
scruple : and the Apostle there strives to show that (1) spiritual sonship does
not depend on natural descent, since the only justification possible to man-
namely, justification by faith was equally open to Jews and Gentiles (ix.);
that (2), so far as the Jews are losing their precedence in the divine favour,
this is due to their own rejection of a free offer which it was perfectly open
to them to have embraced (x.); and that (3) this apparent rejection is softened
by the double consideration that () it is partial, not absolute, since there was
" a remnant of the true Israelites according to the election of grace " ;
and ()
it is temporary, not final, since, when the full blessing of the Gentiles has
1 Just as in the days of Christ the publicans and harlots were admitted before the
Pharisees into the kingdom of God (Matt.ni. 31, 32).