The life and work of St. Paul

EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS, AND THEOLOGY OP ST PATTL. 463
heart, and has become a trustful acceptance of the gift of favour by God, " a
self-surrender of the heart to the favourable will of God as it presents itself
to us in the word of reconciliation." But it has a higher stage (iii.) even than
this, in which it attains a mystical depth, and becomes a mystical incorporation
with Christ (unio mystica) in a unity of love and life a practical
acquaintance with Christ, which completes itself by personal appropriation of
His life and death. In its final and richest development (iv.) it has risen
from the passive attitude of receptivity into a
"
spontaneous active force a
living impulse and power of good in every phase of personal life." 1 In this
last stage it becomes so closely allied to spirit, that what is said of the one
may be said of the other, and that which regarded from without is " faith,"
regarded from within is "spirit." Faith, in this full range of its Pauline
meaning, is both a single act and a progressive principle. As a single act, it
is the self-surrender of the soul to God, the laving hold of Christ, the sole
means whereby we appropriate this reconciling love, in which point of view it
may be regarded as the root of the new relation of man to God in justification
and adoption. As a progressive principle it is the renewal of the personal life
in sanctification 2 a preservation of the " righteousness of God " objectively
1 For these ascensive uses of the word faith see (i.) Rom. iv. 18, Heb. xl. 1 ; (ii.)
Rom. x. 9, Pliil. iii. 7 ; (iii.) Phil. i. 21, Gal. ii. 20; (iv.) 1 Cor. vi. 17. (Baur, N. Test.
Theol. 176.) It should be observed that in his earlier Epistles St. Paul does not use the
word at all in the modern sense of "a body of doctrine," though this meaning of the
word begins to appear in the Pastoral Epistles. From the lowest stage of the word, in
which it merely means "belief" and "faithfulness," he rises at once to the deeper sensa
of " fast attachment to an unseen power of goodness," and then gradually mounts to
that meaning of the word in which it is peculiar to himself, namely, mystic union, absolute
incorporation, with Christ.
2 Rom. xii. 3 ; 2 Cor. x. 15. "Faith," says Luther (Preface to Romans), " is a divine
work in us, which changes us, and creates us anew in God." "Oh es ist ein lebendig,
goschaftig, thatig, machtig Ding um den Glauben, dass es unmachtig ist dass er nicht
ohne Unterlass, sollte Gutes wirken. Er fragt auch nicht ob gute "Werke zu thun sind,
sondern ehe man fragt hat er sie gethan, und ist immer im Thun. . . . Also dass
nnmoglich ist Werke vom Glauben zu scheiden : ja so unmoglich als brennen und leuchten
vom Feuer mag geschieden werden." Coming from hearing (ax