XXXIV. Metaphor and Truth In attempting to gauge the depths of Paul’s thought from the language of his letters, we must distinguish between forms of expression which are intended specially as educative and those through which the inner nature of his ideas looks forth on the world more simply and clearly.
Intellectually, it was necessary for him to make the deep things of God intelligible to pagan converts, and he must use metaphors and images, which would help them to understand; he must start from their thought and train their minds to appreciate higher thought; he was always confronted with the difficult problem of expressing infinite and eternal truths in the utterly inadequate language of finite experience; and with a view to his audience he must use the words of ordinary educated speech and could not take refuge in technical or artificial terms. (An example is given in Section XXX.) Morally, he had to raise his hearers’ standard of judgment and of life, so that the higher morality should be appreciated by them and establish itself in their minds and life.
All the early Christian teachers were confronted with the same problem. They had to create a new language to express a new religion, and yet they must use the current words as moulds, filling them with a new content. Paul was one of the most creative and successful masters of language that have ever lived; but the other Apostles were not mere followers of Paul, and in the beginning they had to speak without Paul as a model to imitate. A Christian language was in process of evolving itself before Paul became a Christian. It was addressed only to Jews, because in the pre-Pauline time Christian teaching was practically confined to the Jews, and it was adapted to their thoughts and customs and beliefs. This earliest Christian speech, strongly Judaic in type, was not without its effect on Paul.
Among the forms of expression that were specially suited to elevate the conceptions of the Hebrews to a higher level were those which picture the work and the being of Christ, by starting from the ideas of priesthood and of sacrifice. Such forms also appealed more or less to almost all pagans. Among the ancient peoples generally the relation of man to God was conceived as in a very large degree conducted through the medium of sacrificial offerings by the instrumentality of a priest who intervened and mediated between the worshipper and the deity.
Already the greatest of the Hebrew prophets were gradually rising above that conception. Christianity as a system of thought and life rose free above it. (I do not mean that all people thought or even yet think so. I am only attempting to express what appears to be the mind of Paul.) But the popular views had not attained to freedom in this respect; and it was necessary that the popular views should be elevated to the higher plane. In order to elevate them it was necessary to begin from them, to assume what was good in them, and to develop and strengthen this element of right.
It is therefore not strange, but quite what was to be expected, that the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews — not Paul himself, but a writer who was in close relations and in hearty sympathy with Paul; not a pupil, but one who took an independent and authoritative view (This author, sympathetic, yet independent of Paul and influential himself, was probably Philip the Evangelist, writing at Caesarea during Paul’s imprisonment, and in frequent communication with him (see a paper on the authorship of Hebrews in Luke the Physician and Other Studies).Acts 24:23alludes to this freedom of communication between Paul and his friends at Caesarea.) — lays far more stress on this idea than any other writer in the New Testament. The task which this author felt to be imposed on him was to explain to the Jewish Christian congregation of Jerusalem — as distinguished from their leaders (ἡγούμενος), who are not addressed and who did not need such instruction — that, and how, Christ’s teaching was the perfect, true, and finally complete religion. “The writer to the Hebrews,” as Professor Paterson says, “deals with the Old Testament dispensation as pre-eminently a priestly and sacrificial system”; that dispensation was indeed founded upon Divine revelation; but it was narrow in its aims and very imperfect in its results. The method of this writer, then, is to take the hopes and wishes current among the Hebrews, and show how they are more perfectly fulfilled by the doctrine of Christianity than by the old dispensation. In doing this, naturally, the writer lays very great stress on the sacrificial and priestly aspect. As the Hebrews wished for a priest, the only true priest in the highest sense is Christ. Since the Hebrews considered that sacrifice is needed or desired by God, then the one true and perfect sacrifice was Jesus; this sacrifice was offered once and for all time; and there should be no thought of any need for the imperfect and unworthy sacrifices of the Hebrew ritual, after that supreme and perfect offering has been made. The fact that the ideas of the ordinary Jews of Palestine had to be carried upwards to a nobler level should not be taken as any proof that Paul, or even the writer to the Hebrews, regarded the office of Christ as a priest and the sacrificial character of His death as being in themselves of real and essential importance, or thought that this aspect of Christ’s work indicated the deepest truth regarding the relation between man and God. The minds of the Jews had to be trained by working on their past experience and acquired habits of thought. This device of describing Christ as “the priest,” and His death as the one great, true and perfect “sacrificial offering,” is merely a way of explaining truth and making it more easily intelligible in its real character to minds habituated to that point of view. A modern missionary to savages, if he be wise, would take hold of their ideas in his teaching and develop them, and he would refrain from destroying any germs of good that lay in their conceptions of deity and Divine demands.
Paul does not insist much on this sacrificial and priestly side of the relation of man to God, partly because he tends to regard the old Hebrew dispensation more as a system of law than as a system of sacrifice by priests, partly because he appealed to the Greeks rather on the side of their philosophic and educated thoughts than through their pagan religious practices and ideas. Yet the ordinary pagans also regarded the relation of man to God as a system of gifts and sacrifices performed with the aid of a priest, who knew the proper rites and accompaniments; and Paul sometimes approaches the minds of his hearers on this side. (Ignatius is far more addicted to appeals of this character. He pictures the life of the Christian as a religious procession in which the sacred symbols are borne through the streets of a city; and his mind had been powerfully affected by the pagan Mysteries, as his language often shows. This subject has been briefly touched in one of the early chapters of the writer’s Letters to the Seven Churches.) Generally, however, the context and the character of such allusions in his letters makes it clear that they are only illustrative and not essential; and it is unfortunate that so much stress has been laid on them by some modern preachers, as if they touched reality and were not largely symbolical. So for example Ephesians 5:2, “Christ gave Himself up for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for an odour of sweet smell”. One might have thought that here the allusion to sacrifice and ritual is plainly metaphorical; but prepossession and the analogy of the Epistle to the Hebrews weigh with many scholars who quote this passage to prove that Paul classed the death of Jesus as literally and in the deepest sense a sacrifice, similar in character and purpose to the sacrifices of animals in the old Hebrew ritual. The comparison of 2 Corinthians 2:14, “the savour of his knowledge in every place,” shows that the allusion to sweet smell is wholly figurative. The expression of Paul that Christ “gave Himself up” for man does not (as is often maintained) necessarily, or even probably, involve the thought of a ritual sacrifice. The word παραδοῦναι does not in itself suggest that, and the idea of sacrifice is introduced into Ephesians 5:2, not by this verb, but by the quotation from the Old Testament which follows, “an offering and a sacrifice for an odour of sweet smell”. In such a passage as Galatians 2:20 the same verb is used; but the conception of sacrifice is evidently absent from the author’s mind. When the blood of Christ is referred to in such passages as Ephesians 1:7, 1 Corinthians 10:16, Romans 5:9, the guiding thought of the passage is not necessarily the idea of sacrifice; and in some cases the thought is probably of quite different character. In Romans 8:5, the idea of sacrifice is introduced into the English version by interpolating the words “as an offering,” which have nothing in the Greek to correspond to them or to justify them: the context there shows that Paul’s thought is moving entirely in the sphere of law, and not in the sphere of ritual.
There are other places, however, such as Romans 3:25, where an allusion to the Hebrew ritual is probable or certain: especially 1 Corinthians 5:7 is a case in point. But certainly metaphor, not philosophic insight, is the character of these allusions.
All such passages may therefore be set aside as giving no proof or indication of the deeper movement of Paul’s thought. They are educative and illustrative; they are used in order to rouse the minds of his readers to think, and do not spring from the philosophic basis of Paul’s religious ideas, or serve as more than a mere index pointing towards it. The one great exception probably is that to Paul Christ was the Paschal Lamb sacrificed for the people. This idea lay deep in the thought of the first century. It strongly affected the mind of John, as of Paul. It had great effect in moulding religious symbolism and imagery. It originates, probably, from the fact that Jesus was on the cross at the time when the Paschal lamb was being slain in preparation for the Passover feast. (Perhaps He was taken down from the cross a little before the exact time of the slaying of the lamb; but this is immaterial, and was certainly considered immaterial in the early Church. The preparations for the Festival, and the providing of the lamb, had occurred earlier.) But it is characteristic rather of early Christian thought and symbolism in general than of Paul in particular. The same remark is true of the whole Pauline doctrine and practice of the Eucharist. So far from being an invention of Paul’s (as has sometimes been maintained), or from having been seriously modified by Paul, the Eucharist in its entirety was taken over by Paul from earlier ritual He found it in the Church, and he transmitted it to the Church as he found it. (A series of papers in the Expository Times, 1910, states the writer’s view.) Its value and its efficacy lay in the unchanged and pure preservation of the rite in its simplicity as it had been created by the Founder in His life, practised often by Him, and finally consecrated in the Last Supper. As invented, or even modified, by Paul or by any other man, the rite was null and empty.
After weighing these considerations we must conclude that the conception of the death of Christ after the image of the sacrifice of the Paschal lamb was early Christian, not specifically Pauline. It was, therefore, imposed on Paul from without, and not originated by him. The priestly and sacrificial form of expression was really alien to Paul’s most characteristic line of approach to this subject. It involved the idea of a priest as intervening, occupying the position of a mediator between man and God. The intervention of a priest was prescribed in the priestly law: the law “was ordained through angels by the hand of a mediator”. (Galatians 3:19.) To Paul, however, and to early Christian thought generally, the relation of man to God is direct, and not through a mediator. There can be no mediator between God and man except God Himself or the man himself. “To us there is one God, the Father, of whom are all things and we unto Him; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and we through Him.” (1 Corinthians 8:6. Compare also1 Timothy 2:5. This is perhaps the thought in the obscure words ofGalatians 3:20.) The essential contrast between the Pauline and the sacrificial idea is so strong that the fashion of speaking about Christ as the priest and mediator must be regarded as in its origin a concession to Jewish feeling. In this matter the Christian doctrine does away wholly with the function of the Hebrew priest. It is merely a device of instruction, a way of illustrating the preparatory and paedagogic character of the Jewish dispensation, to say that the place of the priest in that system is filled by Christ Himself in the Christian system. To the Jews this form of expression meant much in that early age of Christianity: it gathered up their ideas of ritual, brought them to a focus, and thus made the new doctrine intelligible to them in the light of the old. But in modern time there are many minds to which the priestly function seems alien and irrelevant, a mere relic of primitive and undeveloped and wholly inadequate religion; and the idea that the Pauline teaching or the essential nature of Christianity attaches, as such, sacrificial value or priestly character to the work of Christ, takes figure and symbol for reality, and is a profound error, which, besides being erroneous in itself, alienates in many cases the modern mind because it is incomprehensible to that mind.
It is more in accordance with Pauline thought to say that the narrow official priesthood of the old Hebrew system was merged in the universal priesthood of the Christian system. The intervention of the priest was no longer required, when each Christian felt his own direct relation to God and “worked out his own salvation”. This idea of universal priesthood was strongly held in the earliest Church: “ye are an elect race, a royal priesthood” . . . “to offer spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God”. (1 Peter 2:9;1 Peter 2:5.) The union of the offices of king and priest in the person of every Christian appears also in John, Revelation 1:6, Revelation 5:10, Revelation 20:6 : “they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with Him a thousand years”. In the latter quotation the conjunction of kingdom and priesthood shows that the idea is totally unlike Paul’s conception of the saint as king. (See Section XXVIII.) Paul’s conception is caught from the Greek philosophy: the saint is king, because he has been placed above the storms of worldly life. On the other hand, the union of priesthood and kingship in one person is oriental and theocratic. It carries us back into primitive oriental society, when the god ruled his people through his priest and representative on earth. In Peter the idea is expressed in quotations from the Old Testament, but it is moral and symbolical; while in Revelation it has hardened into an external fact placed within the limits of time. That is characteristic of the latter book; in it moral ideas are pictured as if they had become facts of the temporal universe; and this relation shows that the ideas of early Christianity have been dwelt on in meditation by John until they have externalised themselves and are so thought about by him.” (Incidentally we note that this stamps the book as later, and is not consistent with a date under Nero. The Hebraic and adopted element in the book is of course earlier: that element John had learned and thought over: he did not (as some maintain) transfer it literally to his pages, but it guides and often suggests his imagery.) In Paul this priestly character of the saint is wholly unimportant. As to Peter, so to Paul, all the elect are saints and holy; but the latter is content to regard this as a fact of purity and morality: the elect are in the image of Christ: while to the former it conveys the implication that the elect are consecrated as priests of God. The contrast between the different points of view which Ignatius and Paul respectively occupy in regard to this matter is the contrast between a person who, having himself grown out of paganism into Christianity, takes the best forms and thoughts he had known in his own paganism and gives them a Christian connotation and development, and another who, growing up a Jew, with a horror of paganism, yet in long contact with the education and philosophic thought of the pagan world, expounds Christian teaching to the pagan world by using the best forms and thoughts of pagan education and elevating these to the level of Christian life, while he tends rather to shrink from using any specially religious form or idea of paganism. In saying this we implicitly dissent from the theory (which has become fashionable recently but which will soon pass away) that the evolution of Paul’s thought was stimulated or guided in any degree by the pagan Mysteries. That theory appears fundamentally false. Any resemblance is due to the fact that the Mysteries in the time of Paul were developed in answer to the popular need for religious stimulation and guidance, and that Paul presents Christianity as the only complete fulfilment of the popular need. This theory is referred to at greater length in the first Section of Part III of this book.
Between metaphor and philosophic truth one must always distinguish in studying Paul. The purely religious writer, indeed, may always safely adopt the metaphorical type of language, confident that it will rouse the emotion and stir the spirit and affect the life of the hearers; but if he has to satisfy the intellectual judgment he must distinguish. Even the terms “Father” and “Son,” as used of the Godhead, are metaphorical: in their literal sense they denote a human relationship, which cannot have any place in the Divine nature: they suggest to the human mind a certain tender, close relationship which is analogous to, yet absolutely different from, the human. In the Divine nature the Father and the Son are one person: in human nature they are two. In the Divine nature they are co-existent from the beginning, co-eternal, of the same substance: in the human nature one originates from the other at a certain time. The very word “substance” is almost metaphorical, when applied to the Divine nature, for God is spirit. The expression of Divine things, “the deep things of God,” has always to struggle with the utter inadequacy of human language addressed to the finite intelligence, and drawn from finite and partial experience. Yet it has to suggest a “knowledge” that shall be perfect and nonfinite, the real “wisdom” or “knowledge of God”. Man has to grope and to force his way on along the path of knowledge. He gathers to himself detail after detail, and part after part, taking them into his mind, making them portions of himself by realising for himself the spiritual reality and law, eternal, constant, infinite, that lies in or under the finite detail or metaphor. Such knowledge, according to Paul’s vivid expression, is only “piecemeal” or partial knowledge. It has to be done away, and real knowledge substituted for it. The mind of man at last sees the truth stand open and bare and clear before it, and knows instantaneously: it leaps over the infinite chasm — infinite, yet one that must be crossed — that divides the finite from the infinite, and reaches its inheritance of Divine knowledge. Then the partial knowledge falls away, after the mind has seen. In the human life “we see in a mirror, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know fully even as also I was fully known”. So says Paul to the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 13:12). (On this see also a fuller discussion in Section XLII.)
There is no room for hesitation or doubt regarding this perfect knowledge. When the mind of man sees it, it knows at once and for all time; it recognises its true self, for it recognises the Divine, and the end of man is to recognise his true nature in the Divine nature. And so Paul says, “then I shall know fully even as also I was fully known”. This perfect knowledge is the knowledge which God possesses, and it will in the moment of insight be exercised as God exercises it — “as I also was fully known” by the mind and purpose of God. To fall back from this knowledge is fatal: it amounts to the denial of God after having seen Him: it is “the sin against the Holy Spirit,” irremediable and unpardonable. Yet to fall back from this knowledge is not possible. Because this sin is unpardonable, therefore this sin is impossible; for the love of God is infinite, and there is nothing that it cannot conquer, and nothing that it cannot pardon. Here again we are face to face with one of those apparent, but only apparent and not real, self-contradictions. This sin is unpardonable; yet there is nothing that God cannot wash away. The finite intelligence in face of the infinite, owing to the partial, piecemeal, finite, character of its knowledge, is always exposed to such contradictions; it states what seems a fact, and then it sees the other side of the fact, and in trying to express this other side it contradicts its first statement.
Yet, while this perfect knowledge is gained finally as the end and crown of life — in other words, is a possession towards which we move, and which we attain only in putting off the human nature and attaining unto God — and while it is gained instantaneously and absolutely and for ever as a permanent possession, yet with equal truth one may say that it is involved in every step which we make along the path of knowledge and of real life. In the growth of knowledge, there is more than the adding of detail to detail and of part to part. The resulting knowledge is far more than the sum of the parts. It is a new thing. The parts are, so to say, done away and annihilated. One reaches truth for the moment. One recognises the truth, the Divine truth, one’s own nature, one’s real self. There is felt for the moment the glow of the fire of reality and of the Divine. The past, the details, have perished: one’s former self has died: a new self springs into life. This is true in the moral and spiritual life (as was pointed out in a former Section): it is true also in the intellectual life on its highest side, for on that highest side the intellectual and the religious life are merged in one another. In studying Paul it is always necessary to penetrate beneath the metaphor to the reality. What is adoption, as we find the term in his letters? The word adoption in contemporary society described a legal and social process, whereby a family which came to an end so far as blood was concerned, was perpetuated by a species of legal fiction through the introduction of an alien as a member. The process was foreign to the Jews: the term adoption carried no meaning to them, except as an exotic idea which they learned among the Gentiles. They attained the same purpose in another way. To the Greeks and to the Romans, however, adoption was a familiar process, and it roused warm emotional ideas in the minds of many. The term was therefore highly suitable in addressing such people as the congregations of South Galatia, for they knew it in the Graeco-Asiatic law. (That the legal processes referred to in the Galatian Epistle are Graeco-Asiatic as applied in practical administration by the Romans, and that they differ from the analogous, but not identical processes of Roman law, has been proved in my Historical Commentary to the satisfaction of the highest authority, Professor Mitteis. The Romans were not such poor administrators as to force purely Roman law on peoples who possessed already a highly developed system of law.) But it is only a metaphorical expression, and not literally true. It expressed the process of bringing into the family an alien to inherit the religious duties and the property of the family, and this process presented a certain analogy to the process of bringing in the Gentiles to share or to possess the glories promised to the Jews. Yet the analogy is only an incomplete one: there are many points of difference between the two processes. Paul seizes the points of similarity, and slurs over the differences. His readers did the same thing; and therefore they learned to see what Paul had in mind. If, however, one should start from this idea of the inheritance of the Gentiles through “adoption,” and argue that, because the sinner is adopted as a son of God, therefore everything that can be predicated about a legal process of adoption among men can be predicated about the bringing of sinners into the inheritance of God, one would be led into endless blunders.
Now many arguments against the Pauline teaching are founded on misapprehension of his language, which was necessarily figurative. His expression, owing to the bent of his mind (the result of race and inherited character, and his social environment in early years), was largely legal and even commercial. If the legal aspect is pressed, extreme inferences can be drawn, and have been drawn; and these inferences, which by some have been drawn in good faith and with a profound belief that was able to blind itself to much of the erroneousness, have been by others condemned and misjudged as absurdities. They become absurdities, because they are looked at from the wrong point of view. Looked at in their proper character, as mere aids to understanding, the metaphors are wholly free from the absurd consequences which have been imported into them.
So, to take another example, the Christian term “redemption” acquires a connotation very different from the act of redeeming a slave or a captive, and must not be judged as if it were identical. The analogy may be seized, and the difference left out of mind. The use of the metaphor from building is peculiarly characteristic of Paul, and specially suitable for the Greeks. (On the use of metaphor in Paul a paper in the writer’s Luke the Physician and Other Studies treats at more length.) It meant much to them. The figurative character is here so plain that this metaphor is rarely pressed to a wrong use.
One example may be added of false view and inference regarding the position of Paul: this will form our next Section.
