XXXIII. The Gift of Christ
Every line of thought and argument and personal experience — the last doubtless the most efficacious with him — led Paul to the same conclusion. Man cannot save himself: he cannot work out his own salvation through his own efforts: he always goes wrong. The force of circumstances and of his own nature are too strong: the flesh is more dominant than the spirit in his physical constitution. The lifting power of some great enthusiasm, the driving force of some supreme idea, must come to aid his personal efforts, and to strengthen in him the spirit in its struggle against the flesh. This God has provided from the beginning as part of the plan of creation which was originally formed in His mind: He did not introduce this device to remedy a defect that subsequently manifested itself in His creation: He had in view from the first the whole order of human history.
There is some point in the life of most men, when the consciousness seems to have been reached that one can of oneself do nothing for oneself; that one has failed to save oneself: that one’s efforts have all been misdirected: that either one has been deliberately turning one’s back towards God, and seeking after what was absolutely evil, or one’s efforts to “keep justice and to do righteousness,” (Isaiah 56:1.) and to show the goodness which God desires in man, (Hosea 6:6. “I desire goodness, and not sacrifice; the knowledge of God more than burnt-offerings.”) have gone astray. Thus each individual man learns that only through Divine aid can he attain what he has longed for or ought to have longed for. The time is ripe: “the fulness of the time has come”. (Galatians 4:4.)
Similarly, at a certain point in the history of the world as a whole, the collective consciousness of mankind seemed to Paul to have reached the same conclusion through the collective experience of all men. (‘‘Mankind” and “all men” and “the world” here must, of course, be understood as meaning practically the Graeco-Roman world,ἡοἰκουμένη, the world of the Mediterranean civilisation, which alone was known to Paul. This sense is usual at that time. Paul did not exclude the rest of the world: he included in theory both barbarian and Scythian, i.e. those who were alien to the Graeco-Roman world, but in practice he went to that civilised world and his plans and thoughts were confined to what he knew.) The world had failed to save itself and to improve itself It was on the way to destruction through a steady and ever-accelerated deterioration. There was no possible aid for it through any human power, or device, or effort. No hope remained except in Divine aid through the coming of a Divine helper. When this conclusion was reached, then it seemed to Paul that the fulness of the time had come, and that the moment for the Divine purpose to complete itself had arrived. The almost universal belief throughout the Mediterranean world in the time immediately preceding the life of Paul (Perhaps the solitary exception was Virgil, who was full of hope; but his hope was in a vague form connected with the birth of a Divine child. Some would see in the child an expected son of Augustus, which appears to me unjust to the poet, a petty idea such as Virgil could not and did not condescend to. See papers in the Expositor, June and August, 1907, on this subject.) and during the first half of his life despaired of the future and thought that man had failed and that “salvation” could only come through the manifestation of some god on earth. This pagan experience seemed to Paul to attest the correctness of his own belief. This was the moment that the Divine will and purpose had found suitable to send into the world the Divine nature in human form, placed under the law with a view to rise above the law, made subject to human trials and weakness in order to prove superior to them, exposed to the temptations of man so that there might be exhibited a complete and glorious triumph of “man” over all temptations. That in Jesus the Divine nature was stronger than in simple man was true: otherwise, being a simple man. He could not overcome the limitations of human nature. Yet this does not, in Paul’s philosophy of history, invalidate the fundamental fact that Jesus was man: He was man that He might be a pattern: He was God in order that the pattern might be effective and final, absolutely conclusive once and for ever, sufficient for all men and for each individual man before and after Him. That was what Paul called the supreme mystery. It had to be apprehended by each man for himself. It was a matter of faith. The highest test of human nature and will was the capacity to apprehend and believe this great mystery, to know that it was true and to base one’s whole life upon it. This stage is reached by the individual man when — perhaps after long trial to achieve his own salvation, and work righteousness for himself — he has realised his helplessness and incapacity: when he has learned that he must trust to the God who is around him and outside of him, because the Divine element is too weak within him. This supreme moment in the life of a man is regarded by Paul as the moment when the Divine power seizes him, grips him, reveals itself to him and in him. (Galatians 1:14f.) The gift of salvation, therefore, is the free gift of God who has taken hold of the man. The man himself has not earned it, has not deserved it, has done nothing to attain it. He is, as it were, compelled to the new course by the purpose and plan of God: he cannot do otherwise; it is impossible for him to strive against the Divine order, or to kick against the goad. This is part of the order of nature in the evolution of the Divine will. The man has been seized and carried away by it. As part of the inevitable and foreknown order, it is fixed and settled before the foundations of the world. That is, however, in no way inconsistent with Paul’s other point of view that, in the judgment of God and of man, eternal life is the reward of what the man does in life (as has been shown by clear quotations), (See Section XXXI.) and that the man “works out his own salvation”. These are merely expressions from two different points of view. Both can be true. Both must be true. If one is true, the other goes with it. A force that is ineffective is not a force. The power of God inevitably works itself out in the action of the man whom God has seized. The apparent inconsistency lay only in a narrow or false view of the nature of God and of man in their mutual relation. Man has in him the Divine spark: he is capable of movement towards God only through the fact that God is within him. The first stage in salvation is the quickening of the Divine element in the man. Thus the Divine in man recognises the Divine outside of him. The great revelation, the manifestation by God of Himself to man, takes place; and the man is remade, reconstituted, reborn, once and for ever. The rest of life crumbles into ashes, and disappears as if it were naught. This alone remains. From this life begins again.
Yet this new life is a hard life, a long strain, a continuous work, taxing the whole powers of the man from day to day, often seeming to be too hard, and yet always making itself possible to him through the grace of God. Each day brings a sacrifice of oneself, a death to the old and a birth to the new and the higher. Such was Paul’s experience in his own life; and he pictures to his converts the Divine life as being necessarily the same for them.
