11. IX. The Basis of Paul’s Thought— (1) God Is

IX. The Basis of Paul’s Thought— (1) God Is

Probably no one will hesitate as to what was the fundamental principle in the thought of Paul. His whole mind was built on the foundation: God is.

It was impossible for a true and patriotic Jew in his time to doubt about this fundamental truth. The glory of the Jewish race lay in its firm grasp of this principle. Many generations and many centuries had been needed to weld the belief into the fabric of the Jewish mind. Only after many errors, many lapses, many a slipping back into polytheism, did this fundamental principle at last establish itself. The books of Moses, the reiteration of the Ten Commandments, the family teaching and the Passover, could only by slow degrees eradicate any possibility of an alternative from the mind of the Jews. The age of the great Prophets and the teaching of history at last fixed it deep in the Jewish heart. To the Jew the whole glory of Hebrew history was concentrated if. this belief This it was that distinguished his people from every other nation. One people alone held firmly the truth, to which here and there amid other races a great philosopher or a great poet attained by a rather halting and uncertain course. So Aeschylus had attained it: “Zeus, whatever He is and by whatever title it is right to call Him, I address Him by this name.” (Agamemnon, 152.) How great a statement this is! How much it contains of Greek history and of Greek thought. Yet how poor it seems in comparison with the simple and majestic principle of the Jews: God is — the living and real God.

Every great man in the Jewish race had been great in virtue of his firm hold on this truth; and his greatness had been proportionate to the firmness of his grasp. To doubt the existence of the One Living God was to destroy the basis on which the nation’s greatness rested.

Paul never attempts to demonstrate the existence of God: he assumes His existence. The fool might say in his heart “there is no God”; but Paul does not speak to the fools and cannot be understood by them. He starts from this principle always. He addresses only those who believe it, however wavering and insufficient may be their hold on it, whether they do so by nature or through the compelling and convincing power of experience in life. Paul presumes a certain element of wisdom and insight among those whom he addresses. The absence of this elementary power of rightly judging he regarded as a proof of moral degeneration, i.e. of sin.

He does not attempt to prove to his hearers that God is. They must see it for themselves. God has not left Himself without witness, in that He did good and gave them from heaven rains and fruitful seasons. (Paul and Barnabas inActs 14:17.) These are the free gifts of God. Men recognise this, and know that it is He who is filling their hearts with food and gladness. To the present day in Paul’s own Asia Minor a bounteous spring flowing from the rock or the earth and transforming the ground through which it flows from a dry desert into a fruitful garden, is called by those who enjoy its benefits, Hudaverdi, “God-has-given”. To such men, who had understood this elementary fact of the world, Paul addressed himself. (Acts 17:23.) To the rest, a few so-called philosophers, he did not speak. This address opened the pagan world of Greece and Rome to him, for almost all accepted this principle after some fashion. The Divine power, which they worshipped without recognising its real nature, he set forth to them. He pointed out all that followed from this initial and fundamental truth. To Paul and to every Jew the living God was a real power, external to man: He was not the creation of human thought, but independent thereof, not a phantom of the mind, but an absolute and self-existent reality. Further, as man has been made in the image of God, this self-existent primal reality is a person. He lives. From this axiom that there is one personal God, the single self-existent and all-powerful reality, Paul’s thought began. To him it was the starting-point of all thinking and the guarantee of man’s power to think rightly: it was driven home into his nature by the generations that lay behind him, self-evident and final, an ultimate and direct perception not demonstrable by reasoning or argument, but recognised intuitively. In the perception of one’s own existence there is involved the recognition or the assumption of the existence of God. You cannot get behind that. Thought moves onward from that.

Such, then, is Paul’s position. You must have that or nothing. In God alone is confidence. With Him the world becomes intelligible and real, as the envisagement or the work of God. Without Him the attempt to think and to live is a rudderless drifting on a troubled sea. This direct perception Paul would call the first expression of Faith. By Faith we know this primal truth. “Faith is the giving substance to things hoped for, the test of things not seen. . . . (Hebrews 11:1may be quoted as indirectly attesting the ideas of Paul. That Epistle was composed in communication with him, by an intimate friend who expresses from an independent point of view and in non-Pauline words the fundamental idea of Paulinism (see a paper on this subject in the writer’s Pauline and other Studies in the History of Religion).) By Faith we understand that the universe has been framed by the word of God.” Faith is the guide and the moving force in every right act of human life. Without this power of Faith we cannot make even one sure step. To the loose and vague thinker this seems a big assumption — but that is only because he thinks loosely and vaguely.