The life and work of St. Paul

SPISTLE TO THE ROMANS, AND THEOLOGY OF ST. PAUL. 4#1
replies, " Much advantage every way. First, because they were entrusted
with the oracles of God." The result of that advantage was that the Jew
stood at a higher stage of religious consciousness than the Gentile. Judaism
was the religion of revelation, and therefore the religion of the promise ; and
therefore the religion which typically and symbolically contained the elements
of Christianity ;
and the religion of the idea which in Christianity was realised.
Christianity was, indeed, spiritualised Judaism, an advance from servitude to
freedom, from nonage to majority, from childhood to maturity, from the flesh
to the spirit ; yet even in this view Judaism had been, by virtue of its treasure
of revelation, preparatory to the absolute religion. 1 This was its first
advantage. What he might have added as his secondly and thirdly, we may
conjecture from a subsequent allusion, 2 but at this point he is led into a
digression by his eagerness to show that his previous arguments involved no
abandonment on God's part of His own promises. This might be urged as
an objection to what he has been saying. He answers it in one word :
Some of the Jews had been unfaithful shall ; their unfaithfulness nullify God's
faith ? Away with the thought !
3 Alike Scripture and reason insist on God's
truthfulness, though every man were thereby proved a liar. The horror with
which he rejects the notion that God has proved false, interferes with the clearness
of his actual reply. It lies in the word " some." God's promises were true true
;
to the nation as a nation ; for some they had been nullified by the moral disobedience
which has its root in unbelief, but for all true Jews the promises were true. 4
A still bolder objection might be urged "All men, you say, are guilty. In
their guilt lies the Divine necessity for God's scheme of
justification. Must not
God, then, be unjust in inflicting wrath?" In the
very
middle of the objection the
Apostle stops short first to apologise for even formulating a thought so blasphemous
" " 6
I am speaking as men "
speak these ;
thoughts are not my own ;" then to
repudiate it with horror, "Away with the thought!" lastly, to refute it by
'anticipation, " If it were so, how shall God judge the world ? " 6 Thus fortified, as
lit were, by the reductio ad absurdum, and purified by the moral justification, he
follows this impious logic to its conclusion
"
God's truth, it seems, abounded in my
ialseness ; why, then, am I still being judged as a sinner ? and why " " such [he
pauses to remark] is the blasphemous language attributed to me ! " " why may we
,not do evil that good may come ? " To this monstrous perversion of his teaching
he deigns no further immediate reply. There are in theology, as in nature, admitted
antinomies. The relative truth of doctrines, their truth as regards mankind, is not
affected by pushing them into the regions of the absolute, and showing that they
involve contradictions if thrown into We syllogisms. may not push the truths of
the finite and the temporal into the regions of the infinite and the eternal. Syllogistically
stated, the existence of evil might be held to demonstrate either the weak-
ness or the cruelty of God ; but such syllogisms, without the faintest attempt to
answer them, are flung aside as valueless and irrelevant by the faith and conscience
of mankind. The mere statement of some objections is their most effective re-
1
iii. 2. "In vetere Testamento Novum latet, in Novo Testamento vetus patet."
'
ix. 4, 5.
8 Ten times in this Epistle (iii. 4, 6, 31; vi. 2, 15; vii. 7, 13; be. 14; xi. 1, 11), and
in 1 Cor. vi. 15; Gal. ii. 17 ; iii. 21.
iii. 1-4.
4 iii. 5. There is an interesting reading, Kara. av8pu>ir