Blogotional

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

James Denney, Professor of New Testament language, literature and theology, United Free Church College, Glasgow, Scotland; born Paisley, February 5, 1856; educated Highlanders’ Academy, Greenock; Glasgow University and Free Church College; D.D. Glasgow, Chicago Theological Seminary, Princeton University and Aberdeen; minister of Free Church, Broughty Ferry, 1886-97; author of “The Epistle to the Thessalonians,” ‘‘Second Epistle to the Corinthians” (“Expositor’s Bible”), “Studies in Theology,” “The Epistle to the Romans” (“Expositor’s Greek Testament”), “Gospel Questions and Answers,” “The Death of Christ,” “The Atonement and the Modern Mind,” “Jesus and the Gospel,” etc.



“Where is boasting, then? It is excluded. By what law? of works? Nay: but by the law of faith. Therefore we conclude that a man’s justified by faith without the deeds of the law. Is he the God of the Jews only? is he not also of the Gentiles? Yes, of the Gentiles also: Seeing it is one God, which shall justify the circumcision by faith, and uncircumcision through faith. Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid: yea, we establish the law.” - Romans 3:27-31.

At first sight this is a difficult and intractable passage. Our minds are hurried abruptly from one question to another, and we fail to see how the questions are connected, or what is their significance when we take them altogether. Readers who are more familiar with the verses which precede than with almost anything in the New Testament, relax their attention unintentionally when they come to the words, ‘‘that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus.” They feel that there they have got to the heart of the matter - the revelation of God in a manner which is at once the vindication of His own character and the hope of sinful men. Their minds rest, and can not but rest there, and they go over and over the wonderful verses in which Paul interprets for all time the mystery of the cross: Christ Jesus, whom God set forth in propitiatory power, through faith in His blood, with a view to demonstrating His righteousness, that he might be just himself, arid justify all who believe in Jesus. But Paul does not himself stop at that point. The sight of Christ on his cross thus interpreted, of Christ a propitiation in his blood, of the Lamb of God bearing the sin of the world, searched and quickened his whole being. We read in one of the gospels, of the men who put Jesus to death, that sitting down they watched him there. So we must conceive Paul ‘s attitude as he writes this passage. He writes with his eye on the Son of God crucified for our sins. His heart is being searched and sounded by the revelation of the cross, and as these swift far-reaching questions rise in quick succession to his lips, we see how he is being moved within. Each of them is prompted by the cross. It is the power of Christ’s passion, descending into the apostle’s heart and making itself intelligible there, which comes out in them. Each of them is itself a revelation. Each of them implicitly asserts a truth which belongs to the very essence of the Christian faith. All of them together may be said to exhibit the notes of true Christianity as understood by Paul. They may be various, but they are not incoherent; they are connected by their common relation to the cross; they find their unity and their impulse there.

As Paul contemplates Christ a propitiation in his blood, the first question prompted by the sight is, Where is boasting then? - And he answers in a word, Excluded. Standing by Mount Calvary, and realizing that there is no way to God but that way, we become conscious of an infinite obligation to Christ. The deepest, strongest, most omnipresent of all Christian feelings is the feeling of debt. The one thing a man can not do, who has taken home to his heart the significance of the cross, is to make claims as of right against God. He feels that he is debtor to Christ for what he can never repay. Christ has done for him what he could not do for himself, and what no effort could ever enable him to do; lie has made atonement for his sins; and as this truth, on which all his hope depends, sinks into his mind and masters it, his soul is flooded with a sense of obligation to Christ in which all other feelings are swallowed up. Boasting is excluded; it is peremptorily and finally excluded; the Christian’s whole life is a life of debt to God.

It may seem to some that a truth so obvious is hardly worth stating, either by an apostle or by a modern preacher. But to Paul it was a great revelation, and a stage comes in every serious religious life in which it has to be learned anew. There is, as Dr. Chalmers said, a “natural legality “in the heart of man which urges him to seek righteousness “as it were of works,” instead of submitting to the righteousness of God. Even a Christian lapses half unconsciously into this unchristian at¬titude; he tries to be good, so to speak, with¬out God; he tries to achieve some character or virtue out of his own resources, and clothes himself in that character or virtue to challenge God’s approbation. True, he can only do this when the cross has sunk below his horizon; but it does sometimes sink; and it needs the painful experience of failure to bring him back to it, and to teach him that he must owe the power of the new life to the atonement. What Paul felt with startling force as he looked at Christ crucified, has found expression in every variety of Christian creed. All churches confess with one heart, tho in different forms of speech, that in our spiritual life we begin by being, and must forever continue to be, God’s debtors. We can have no relation to him but that of owing him all we are and all we hope to become. Salvation is of the Lord; and the moment we are influenced by any other thought, it ceases to be operative in us. This is what the Lutheran Church means when following in the train of Paul, it teaches that we are justified by faith alone, without works of law. What does that mean, as a religious truth, but
this: that before we have done anything, before we can do anything, nay, in order that we may be able to do anything, the mercy of God is there for us sinners in Jesus Christ; there, before our faces, independent of any action of ours, an inconceivable unmerited mercy, which we can only welcome, and to which we must be indebted forever? This, too, is the Calvinistic doctrine of election. For what does that mean (as a doctrine based on experience) but this: that the initiative of salvation lies with God? that the Master can always say to the disciple, Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you? - And that the disciple must always say to the Master, Not unto us Lord, not unto us, but unto thy name be the glory? The religious import of Calvinism is precisely that of the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith; it is justification by faith expressed in the form of a doctrine of the divine sovereignty. And the same may be said even of what seem to be intellectually poor and unworthy, even degrading and superstitious modes of expressing the truth. The sacramentarianism of the Roman Catholic or of the Anglican Church, which ascribes a peculiar sanctity to sacramental elements, and makes them in themselves vehicles of grace, would never command the influence it does unless it represented, as it were, to the very senses, the truth (for surely it is the truth) that the grace of God is independent of our deserts, antecedent to our exertions, and that our sole relation to God must be that of being His debtors for it. Lutherans, Calvinists, or Catholics, to call them so—Paul anticipated every particle of the truth enshrined in their characteristic and fundamental doctrines when lie expressed the first conviction generated in his heart by the cross in the swift question and answer, Where is boasting then? It is excluded. Humility, as Calvin puts it, is the first, second, and third thing in the Christian religion.

There can be no doubt that this necessity of coming under an infinite obligation to Christ is the great difficulty in the way of the acceptance of Christianity. It is still what it was when Paul preached - the offense or stumbling-block of the cross. It was not the cross itself which was or which is an offense: it was the cross interpreted as Paul interpreted it, the cross a propitiation for sin, the cross requiring men from the very beginning to humble themselves in a way they had never dreamed of, and to owe their very being as children of God, having access to the Father, to what had been done for them by another. Yet this is the test of Christianity. It is not the man who admires Christ, or who essays to imitate Him, or who exalts Him as the measure and standard of perfection, who is the Christian according to the New Testament; it is the man who is debtor to Christ for the forgiveness of his sins, and for every hope of holiness and impulse to it. Try yourself by that.

Humility is sometimes discredited in the Church because it is misunderstood. It is regarded as an artificial depreciation of one’s self in comparison with others. But that has no connection with humility as it is represented here. Humility is simply the recognition of the real relation between ourselves and God. To be humble is to be in one’s spirit and temper what we are in point of fact— God ‘s debtors; debtors forever, debtors all the time, to God’s redeeming love in Christ. This habit of mind has nothing to do, as is sometimes supposed, with low spirits. It is not characterized by want of hope or inspiration. On the contrary, the most unmistakable indication that the Church lives in the sense of its infinite obligations to Christ is the intensity and fervor of its praise. Boasting is excluded, says Paul; yet did any man ever boast as he? Why, he uses this very word boasting, or words of the same root, over fifty times in his epistles. There is no word he could less afford to dispense with. What he does exclude, or rather what the cross excludes, is that self-confidence in which a man would be independent of God; but when that goes, then room is made for boasting in the Lord. Put the atonement out of the Church‘s faith, and adoration dies on her lips. You may have complacent or sentimental hymns; you may have insincere or flattering hymns; you will have no doxologies like those of the New Testament. It is when the sense of what we owe to Christ strikes into our hearts as it struck into the hearts of the apostles that we can say with them, “Unto him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood,… to him be glory and dominion for ever and ever.” That is the beginning of Christianity, and the end of it. It is the exaltation of Christ in the inspiration of what we owe to him.

But as Paul contemplates the cross, another question arises swiftly in his mind. The cross is a revelation of God; it is the final and supreme revelation; for whom is it meant? The question may seem to us almost unreal, but it was a question of fateful importance then. God had had a people peculiarly His own; lie had been a God of Jews in a sense in which He had not been the God of other nations. Whatever difficulties we may have in adjusting it to our general conceptions of human history, the fact remains that God had been present in the history of Israel in a manner and to issues to which He had not been present in the history of other races, He had been the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob, the God of Moses and the prophets, the God of the pious souls who wrote the Psalms, as He had not been the God of the Gentile world. This had been in point of fact the method of His dealing with the human race, and whatever problems it may present to our apologetics, it is useless to quarrel with the way God has made and ruled I-his world. Salvation is of the Jews, let comparative religion say what it will. But God’s revelation of Himself to the Jews culminated in the cross, and as Paul looked at it, the truth rose upon his mind that the limitations of the earlier stages of the true religion had passed away. The deliverance from Egypt, the restoration from Babylon, the interpretation of history by Amos and Isaiah and Jeremiah - these might have significance only for the Hebrew race; but Christ on his cross is propitiation for sin. Christ bearing sin, Christ dying in love and dying for righteousness’ sake: to whom is that intelligible? to whom does it appeal? To what, rather, let us ask, did it appeal in Paul himself? Was it to the Jew or to the Pharisee? No, it was to the man in Paul that Christ appealed from His cross. It was to the conscience stricken with sin, and doomed to impotence and despair. And as Paul realized this he realized at the same time the great truth which is peculiarly associated with his name - that the gospel is not for a nation, but for all mankind. Is God, the God who reveals Himself at the cross, a God of Jews only? No! There is nothing in the world so universally intelligible as the cross. Make it visible, and there is not a man on earth who may not know what it means and respond to its power. “I, if I be lifted~ up from the earth, will draw all men unto myself.” The second characteristic, then, of the true religion, which will live in the heart of every man who knows what it is, is its universality. The cross appeals to me not in virtue of anything which distinguishes me from others, but in virtue of that in which I am one with every member of the human race. It was the sense of this which made Paul a missionary. I am debtor, he said, not to Christ only, but to Jew and Greek, to wise and unwise. The gospel is not ours; we have no interest in it, and no hope in it, that is not common to the whole family of man. To exclude any section of humanity from it, on any ground whatever, is to disinherit ourselves.

One is tempted to remark in passing that this throws an interesting light on the distinction that is popular in some circles, not to say fashionable, between Paulinism and Christianity. Paul is represented as a person of such abnormal individuality that his interpretation of Christianity must be heavily discounted, or, indeed, completely ignored. It is hardly worth while trying to understand him, let alone feeling under any obligation as far as possible to agree with him. Perhaps it is pleasant to have the consciousness of superiority to the protest of evangelists and of theologians, but it is surely a case in which to rejoice with trembling. May we not rather say that Paul became the first of missionaries, and established, as he does in this passage, the missionary character of the Christian religion just because he had eliminated from his gospel all that belonged to the Jew or the Pharisee, all that could be characterized as personality or idiosyncrasy, and saw confronting each other and calling to each other, as deep calls unto deep, the infinite love of God in the cross of Jesus, and the hopeless sin and misery of man. Those who contrast Christianity and Paulinism provoke one to say that they understand neither Christ nor Paul. Paulinism will go out of fashion only when sin and grace have ceased to need and to seek each other, and if it does, Christianity will perish with it.

Commonplace as it ought to be - an immediate inference from the fact that the cross appeals directly and exclusively to what is human in man - the truth which is involved in the question, Is He a God of Jews only? is one that is far from commanding practical acceptance in Christendom. It is traversed still, as it was in ancient times, by national pride. It is traversed by that national Pharisaism which disbelieves in the character or in the Christianity of other peoples, and re¬gards them as all, somehow, in the sight of heaven, less favored races. It is traversed even in the Church itself by the ecclesiastical exclusiveness which would confine the redeeming force of the cross of Christ to the boundaries of some particular organization. It is traversed by all who, on whatever ground, are opposed to the work of Christian missions. Such opponents are not to be found only outside of the Church; they are numerous and sometimes they are audible within. Now no one would assert that all missions have answered the hopes with which they were set on foot, and least of all, would any missionary assert that no mistakes have been made, that no wrong methods have been tried, or that nothing remains to be learned from ex¬perience. But that does not touch on the great question, whether God is the God of all, and whether the revelation of God made in Christ the propitiation for sin, is one which is meant for all, which all need, and which all are capable of receiving. When that question is raised, it can only be by those who have the whole significance of the cross yet to discover. The man who has seen what Paul saw, who has felt what Paul felt, dares not limit the range of that divine appeal. He dare not say, This speaks to me, and exerts its power over me; it has meaning and virtue for those who have been brought so far in the life of the soul without its help; but there are races to whom it does not speak, and to whom it will not speak for generations to come; they must be raised by some other discipline to the level at which in the long run they may see and comprehend and be subdued by the cross. Such a line of argument is not only confuted by all the experiences with which our missionary reports are crowded; it is confuted ab initio by the inspired insight of Paul. The discipline of law and of labor is no doubt indispensable in human life, as indispensable within the bounds of Christendom as beyond them. But it is not the discipline of law and of labor which qualifies us to appreciate the gospel; it is the discipline of sin, of failure, of despair. And the gospel comes not to put the finishing touches to a work which has been carried so far in independence of it; it comes to initiate the divine life in the soul. Law and labor can cooperate with it: they can do nothing of consequence without it, and they can not take its place. As long as the cross is visible, God speaks from it to the world in a language that all the world can understand; He proclaims a message from it that all the world needs to hear. Is He a God of Britons only? or of white men only? Who that has bowed down, as Paul did in his soul ‘s great need, and received the atonement, but must answer with him, No! not of Britons only, or of white men only, but of all; the God of Kaffirs and Hindus and Chinamen, exactly as He is our God; and there is that in every race, underneath the dark skin and the alien traditions, which leaps up as it does in us to the reconciling love of God. That is why we are debtors to all, and have no liberty and no inclination to listen to those who decry mission work. If there is any meaning in the cross, it means that there are no step-children in the family of God. The most superior person must sink or swim with all his kind.

There is another side to this which must not be overlooked. If there are those for whom the gospel as Paul preached it is supposed to be as yet too good, there are those, on the other hand, who are supposed to be too good for the gospel in this particular shape. They do not deny that in some large indefinite sense the world has been indebted to Christ and is indebted to Him still; the leaven has leavened the lump, and in the process they, too, have in a measure been changed; but it is unnecessary, many think, to go further. There is no need, certainly, to disparage this collective impersonal Christianity; we ought to thank God that there is so much of it as there is. But to any one standing where Paul stood, feeling in his own spirit what Paul felt, bow inconsiderable a thing it is. Christianity means nothing whatever unless it means the sense of obligation to Christ; but what does this sense of obligation itself mean, when we keep it out of relation to the personal Savior, and to the divine supernatural deeds on which the hope of the world depends? When we think of the Son of God bearing the sin of the world, can we believe that it will ever be. less than the first interest of every man that breathes to know Him, to come under the infinite obligation to Him which constitutes Christianity, to call Him for what He has done Redeemer and Lord? No inheritance of science or philosophy, no advance of art or civilization can ever make the atonement less than essential. There is something in the cross of Christ which strikes deeper into the heart of man than all these elevating and refining powers, and which works miracles in it that none of them can work; and therefore we are debtors to the wise and to the Greek, to that modern intelligence which is often said to be alienated from the gospel, as much as to the barbarians and the uncultured. I believe it is from the cross, as a center, interpreted as Paul interpreted it - from the place at which a supernatural person achieved a supernatural work - that the modern mind, so far as it has been estranged from the New Testament mode of thinking, will be won for that mode of thinking again. The Christian view of all things will be recovered when the soul comes into the Christian relation to Christ bearing the sin of the world. A missionary society naturally thinks of those who have never heard Christ’s name; but it is not they only who need the reconciliation; it is not they only to whom God appeals in His Son; it is not they only for whom Christ died; and if we would do justice to the revelation of the cross, we must make it our calling to carry it not only to what are visibly the dark places of the earth, but to those also that boast of their enlightenment. Is God the God of barbarous races only? Is He not also the God of the races which have produced art and science and philosophy? Yes, He is their God, too; and as their need of reconciliation is the same, it appeals to them on the same terms.

We can not think of this common appeal of the reconciling love of God to all men without distinction without being disappointed with the smallness of the results achieved. The cross has not yet done much, we are tempted to say, to unite the human race. Even Christian nations are at war with each other. If they are not at war, they live in a chronic state of mutual envy, hatred and suspicion, which is morally if not materially as disastrous as war itself. Within a Christian nation there is strife and estrangement of classes; in spite of the all-reconciling symbol which is over them, men are arrayed in opposing camps, which represent hostile interests, and neither love nor trust each other. Nay, the Church itself is rent in pieces by questions of order and organization, and men unchurch each other over matters like these. The only explanation of such things is that the cross meanwhile has sunk beneath the horizon. If it were visible, if men saw what it meant, this would be impossible. The common relation to the cross would subdue to itself every other relation in human life.

This brings us to Paul’s third and last question. Do we make void the law through faith? The question may seem unprovoked, but it was a very real one then, and it resumes its reality as soon as the gospel exerts its power on a great scale. The gospel is a proclamation of the free forgiveness of sins, and the forgiveness of sins is capable both of being misinterpreted and abused. It was misinterpreted and abused in the apostolic age. It was regarded by some people as giving a license to sin with impunity. The enemies of Paul, who affected zeal for righteousness, slanderously insinuated that such was his teaching. He made void the law through faith, they said. In modern language, he abolished morality with his religion. The forgiveness of sins, freely bestowed upon faith, acted as a solvent on morality; the atonement was an opiate to the conscience; the man who accepted it did not take life seriously any more. This problem of the relation of faith and law, religion and morality, pardon and the good life, often comes up anew; there are always people full of moral interest, and especially of interest in their own morality - their very own - to deprecate the Pauline emphasis on the cross. When the objection was actually made to Paul’s gospel that it was unfavorable to morality, that it meant, in plain English, let us do evil that good may come, the more sin the more grace, he denounced it indignantly as a slander. The people who say anything of the kind incur the just judgment of God. There are still people who ought to be answered so. Even here, where it is rather the inevitable consequences of the cross with which he is dealing, Paul repels rather than refutes the idea that faith makes void the law, or that the cross of Christ as he has interpreted it is hostile to morality. The very contrary, he maintains, is the case. “We establish the law.” It gets its due for the first time in the lives of Chris¬tian men reconciled to God by the blood of the cross. The righteousness of the law is ful¬filled in them, walking as they do, not after the flesh, but after the spirit.

There are many ways in which this can be brought out. It can be proved by looking at what the cross of Christ was, even historically. The cross establishes the law, indicates mo¬rality, because it triumphs over the one thing which more persistently and insinuatingly than anything else tends to undermine it. The one undying enemy of Christ, it has been said, is the great God Pan: in other words, it is the feeling which creeps upon us insensibly that all things are one, and one with a unity in which all differences disappear. Truth and falsehood, right and wrong, nature and spirit, necessity and freedom, the personal and the impersonal, that which we inherit and that which we earn for ourselves - all these are perpetually in process of interpenetration and of transformation into each other. The differences between them are evanescent and unreal, even the difference between right and wrong. And suddenly, in this world of moral haze and uncertainty, where all things are in flux and nothing sure, we come upon the cross, and One hanging on it who died for the difference, and made it as real as His agony and passion, as eternal as the being of God which He revealed. Of all who are in¬terested in morality, the Christian is pledged by the cross to an interest the most passionate and profound. There is a challenge in the very aspect of it. It calls aloud, Who is on the Lord’s side? For the Lord has a side. It binds every man who owes allegiance to it to resist, even unto blood, striving against sin.

The falsehood of the suggestion that the Christian religion abolishes morality - or that forgiveness favors sin - is seen more clearly still if we think how forgiveness has just been connected by Paul with Christ as a propitiation for sin. If God ‘s forgiveness meant indulgence if it had no content but this, that God simply took no notice of sin, no doubt the charge would often be true. But the only forgiveness of which the New Testament speaks is that which is bestowed at the cross; and is there anything there which speaks of indulgence? At the cross of Christ sin is judged as well as pardoned; and the sinner who takes into his heart the Christian forgiveness, the forgiveness preached at the cross, takes into his heart along with it God’s annihilating sentence on his sin. Christ bore our sins; that is how they are pardoned; and the virtue of His submission to their doom enters into the Christian along with pardon, so that he is dead to sin. It is because Christ’s death has this character, because it is a death in which He is bearing sin that sinners have a point of attachment in Christ, and can become one with Him. If Christ were the holy one of God and we could say no more of Him than that, who could approach Him? Who could dare, to use the language which is so common, to identify himself’ with Him? But He is the Holy One of God bearing our sin; that is what He is at the cross, and that is our point of contact with Him; it is as He dies in our place, bearing our burden, that He draws us to Himself and unites our life to His own; and the new life that we live in Him is not a life to which law is indifferent; it is a life into which the awful sanctity of the law has entered once for all through the death of Jesus. This is the experience and the gospel of the apostle; and we can understand the indignation with which he repels a charge which virtually meant that Christ had died in vain.

And once more, we can give an experimental proof that religion does not abolish morality; only the forgiven man, it may be boldly maintained, exhibits goodness in its true proportions. The law is only established; that is, it only gets justice done to it when it is written on the heart. But it can not be written on the heart till the heart is made tender, and the heart is not made really tender by anything but that humility which is born in it as it stoops to be forgiven for Christ’s sake. It is this which makes it sensitive to all its obligations both to God and man, and not till then does morality get justice in a man’s life. The man who is proud of his integrity, and who needs no repentance nor forgiveness, thinks he is fulfilling the law; it does not occur to him that the only fulfilling of the law is love, and that love in Christian proportions and Christian intensity is the response of the soul to what God has done for us in Christ at the cross. We love, with the only love which does justice to the law, with the only love which works righteousness and holiness of truth - we love because He first loved us. And according to the plainest teaching of the New Testament, we do not know what God’s love is until we learn it at the cross, “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His son to be the propitiation for our sins.” The saint never lived who did not rest his sanctity from beginning to end on the forgiveness of sins. The blood of Christ is no opiate to the conscience; it is a slander so to say, a blind and fatal guiltiness so to think; it is the quickening of the conscience, it is death to sin and life to God.

Such are the thoughts that rise in Paul’s mind as he contemplates Christ set forth in his blood, a propitiation for sin. Whatever else they are, they are great thoughts; they are thoughts of that order, the truth of which is seen not in the light we can cast upon them, but in the light which they cast upon everything else. The Christian Church is passing through a hard and perplexing time; not a time of persecution, but one of indifference and even of contempt, in which injustice is easy. There are many who tell us that it is permanently discredited, and that the difficulty felt in almost all the Christian communities of obtaining ministers and missionaries is an unmistakable indication of this. We have heard such things before; they have been often heard in the course of Christian history. The way to meet them and defeat them is not to minimize the gospel, not to reduce it to its lowest terms or to what we consider such, but to maintain it in the integrity of the apostolic testimony. It is by its greatness it must prevail, by the sense in it of a breadth and length and depth and height passing knowledge. Intelligence may be alienated by the trivial; but great ideas, great truths, great problems, great tasks, always fascinate and subdue it again. We are debtors both to Greeks and barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish; let us preach to them all Christ crucified, the power of God and the wisdom of God; and if we do it with this apostolic comprehension, in the sense of what we owe to God, in the sense of the appeal which His love makes to all without distinction, in the sense, too, of a new obligation to a holy life, we can leave it to God to make it salvation to every one who believes.