The life and work of St. Paul

EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS, AND THEOLOGY Of ST. PAUL. 481
Such statements as these, if left unsupported and unexplained, might well
turn every Jewish reader from respectful inquiry into incredulous disgust ;
and he therefore proceeds to the difficult task of justifying his views.
The task was difficult because he has to prove scripturally and dialectically
the truths at which he had arrived by a wholly different method. The central
point of his own conviction was that which runs through the Epistle to the
Galatians, 1 that if salvation was to be earned by " doing "
if the Law was
sufficient for justification then Christ's death was needless and vain. If he
were right in his absolute conviction that only by faith in the blood of Christ
are we accounted righteous before God, then clearly the Law stood condemned
of incapacity to produce this result. Now by the Law St. Paul meant the
whole Mosaic Law, and there is not in him a single trace of any distinction
between the degree of sacredness in the ceremonial and the moral portion of
it. If there had been, he might perhaps have adopted the luminous principle
of the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, and shown that the Law was
only abrogated by the completeness of its fulfilment ;
that its inefficiency only
proves its typical character ; and that the type disappeared in the fulness of
the antitype, as a star is lost in the brightness of the sun. This method of
allegory was by no means unfamiliar to St. Paul ; he not only adopts it
freely, 2 but must have learnt it as no small element of his Rabbinic training
in the school of Gamaliel. But, on the one hand, this attribution of a spiritual
depth and mystery to every part of the ceremonial Law would have only
tended to its glorification in the minds of Jndaisers who had not yet learnt
its abrogation ; and, on the other hand, it was not in this way that the relation
of the Law to the Gospel had specially presented itself to the mind of Paul.
The typical relation of the one to the other was real, and to dwell upon it
would, no doubt, have made St. Paul's arguments " less abrupt and less op-
pressive to the consciousness of the Jews " 3
; but it would also have made
them less effective for the emancipation of the Church and the world. The
Law must be deposed, as it were, from its long primacy in the minds of
the Jews, into that negative, supplementary, secondary, inefficient position
which alone belonged to it, before it could with any prudence be rein-
stalled into a position of reflected honour. It had only a sxiboi-dinate, provisional
importance; it was only introduced per accidens. Its object waa
psedagogic, not final. St. Paul's reasoning might inflict pain, but the pain
which he inflicted was necessary and healing; and it was well for the Jews
and for the world that, while he strove to make his arguments acceptable
by stating them in a tone as conciliatory as possible, he did not strive to
break the shock of them by any unfaithful weakening of their intrinsic
force.
i. His first statement had been that the Law could not justify.* That
1 Gal. ii. 21 ; iil. 21.
2 The muzzled ox, 1 Cor. Ix. 9 ; Sarah and Hagar, Gal. Iv. 24 the ; evanescence of the
light on the face of Moses, 2 Cor. iii. 7 13 ; the following rock, 1 Cor. x. 4 ; the cloud
and sea, 1 Cor. x. 1, 2.
8
Pflejderer, Pavlinismus, L 73, E. *
T.
Rom. iii. $0,