THE THEOLOGY OF PAUL

CHAPTER XVI

JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH

THE reconciliation which was accomplished by Christ comes into force by means of faith in those who receive the announcement of it, and accept the offer to let themselves be reconciled (Rom. iii. 25; 2 Cor. v. 20). Faith is therefore the appropriation of the salvation offered in Christ Jesus as a personal and conscious possession of salvation, or as a condition of righteousness before God, a condition of "peace."

According to its common literal significance faith is the confident conviction of the truth of the divine message, whether in the form of promises of future blessings, or of the report of historical revelations of God-a conviction grounded upon trust in God, whose word is believed. Thus the faith of Abraham (Rom. iv. 3) was trust in God that He could and would make His promise come true in spite of all appearance to the contrary. To this faith of Abraham the specific Christian faith is, according to Paul, essentially similar, as being trust in the God who raised Christ from the dead and thereby announced His purpose of justifying the ungodly (Rom. iv. 5, 24). Even when faith appears

as primarily purely theoretical belief-e.g. of the truth of the announcement that God has raised His Son from the dead (Rom. x. 9)—the specific religious element in it does not consist in the theoretic acceptance of the fact, but in the trust in the divine saving purpose which is revealed in that event. This trust is not so much an act of the intellect as an affection of the heart, a mode or attitude of feeling, as, indeed, Paul says, "With the heart man believeth." This feeling is, it is true, awakened by the involuntary impression made by the proclamation of the gospel message, which forces itself upon the receptive soul through "the demonstration of the Spirit and of power" as divine truth; and, in so far, faith is an effect produced by God through His word. The believer is laid hold of by Christ, is surrendered to the teaching of the Gospel. God causes the light of the knowledge of the glory of God to shine into our hearts (2 Cor. iv. 6; Rom. vi. 17; Phil. iii. 12). But through all this, faith is still a human action of self-determination with reference to God and Christ, a will-act of obedience towards the higher truth of the Gospel, of submission to the way of justification which is offered by God, a laying hold upon Christ on the ground of being laid hold of by Christ (Rom. i. 5, vi. 17, x. 3, 16; Phil. iii. 12). Only, in all this it is to be observed that faith is not an act of obedience in the sense of a good work or a meritorious service which might have a righteousness of its own; it consists, on the contrary, in a renunciation of all glorying in oneself, of all achievements, actions and capacities of one's own, in order to have instead all

given to one as God's gift of grace. Faith is therefore humble and trustful self-surrender to the Divine will, revealed through the gospel as a will of mercy offering its gifts to men, not as a will of law demanding service from men. This contrast is characteristic of the specifically Pauline conception of faith; faith stands in direct contrast to a man's own works, his legal acts of obedience, which, as merits, put forth a claim to reward, in contrast to boasting of one's own advantages or virtues of whatsoever kind (Rom. iii. 27, iv. 4 f., x. 3 ff.; Phil. iii. 4 ff.). It is precisely the recognition of the worthlessness from the religious point of view of all such advantages, of the powerlessness of man to attain righteousness by his own strength, which forms the starting-point. But on the basis of this humble valuation of self, the believer rises to a confident trust in God's mercy, gratefully accepts His free gift, finds in the gospel a power of God to inspire the heart which labours miserably under the yoke of the law, and thus he becomes filled with grateful love to the mediator of this gift who has purchased it by the offering of His own life upon the cross (Rom. vii. 25-viii. 2; Gal. ii. 20 f., iii. 22 ff.; Phil. iii. 8 ff.).

On this, again, rests a further peculiarity of the Pauline conception of faith. As the As the message of salvation is concentrated for him in the word of the cross of Christ, faith, too, acquires this specific reference to Christ as the crucified. While the primitive Christian faith of the Palestinian church directed itself rather to Christ as the Messiah-King who was to come again, and was therefore, in so far,

rather an eschatological hope, the emphasis of the Pauline faith lies more on the personal surrender to the "Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me" (Gal. ii. 20). Thus, there is here united with the firm trust the still more intimate feeling of grateful love to the loving Saviour, in which the believer feels himself bound up with his Saviour in the closest union of life to a moral and spiritual personal unity. This mystical union with Christ, this self-identification with Christ in a fellowship of life and death, is the new and significant peculiarity in Paul's conception of faith. In this unreserved, selfforgetting surrender of the whole man to the Saviour, in which the revelation of the divine love, as well as the embodiment of the ideal for man, is beheld as a personal life, the believer feels himself to be 66 a new creature." The old ego with its inner disharmony, its vacillation between defiance and apprehension, between selfish disobedience and slavish fear, has disappeared, and a new ego has come to life, in which selfless, trustful love to the highest personal ideal has become the ruling affection, the centre of the personal life, and the spring of all religious feeling and moral effort. The ideal of the Son of God has been taken up by love into the heart and has become in immediate experience the power of a life of sonship to God. That is expressed in the fine saying: "It is no longer I that live but Christ that liveth in me, and the life that I now live in the flesh, I live in the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me" (Gal. ii. 20). It is evident that here life in the faith means the same as "Christ liveth in me." In that saying Paul

has given the authentic explanation of what faith in Christ, in the full sense, means to him: it is the mystic union with Christ, the surrender of the whole ego to Christ to be made one in life with him. The expression to be "in Christ" was coined by Paul as the standing formula for the conception of faith in Christ; he is a Christian who is in Christ, or, what comes to the same thing, who has Christ dwelling in him. Only where this is actually the case as a fact of experience is true faith present, as clearly appears from 2 Cor. xiii. 5: "Prove yourselves whether ye be in the faith. Or know ye not that Christ is in you?" And the same is expressed negatively in Rom. viii. 9: "He who hath not the spirit of Christ is none of his." This specifically Pauline expression, to be "in Christ," is without doubt formed in imitation of the generally current expression to be "in the Spirit," which,' according to the animistic use of language, means the same as to be in a condition of being filled, seized on, possessed, by a higher spiritual being, a conception which the Greeks express by "enthusiasmos (èv Oew eîvai). But what others understood as an extraordinary condition of ecstasy Paul thought of as the permanent condition of Spirit-filled Christians; and as he directly identified the exalted Christ with the Spirit (2 Cor. iii. 17) it followed as a logical consequence that the faith which unites men with Christ in a community of life can be described as a being in the Spirit or in Christ. Faith is therefore not yet present in the full sense where it is mere

1 Cf. Gunkel, Die Wirkungen des hl. Geistes, p. 92; Deissmann, Die neutestl, Formel " in Christo Jesu."