Paul's Second Struggle and Its Result

Paul, as we have seen, had immediately after his conversion to Christianity experienced a great struggle in Arabia. We have pointed out that it was the conflict rather of the missionary than of the man. It came from the sense of incongruity between his conviction of an apostolic call and his experience of a physical thorn. He recognised the thorn as a mark of the Divine displeasure, and the problem in his mind was to determine how, with the evidence of such displeasure branded on his forehead, he could go forth as missionary to the Gentiles. His Arabian struggle was the effort of his soul to experience a liberation from his thorn — not by reason of his thorn’s physical pain, but on account of its moral significance. He wanted to feel that he went forth in the eyes of the heathen accompanied by the unblemished favour of God, and without any outward mark to indicate the presence of God’s disfavour.

The result of that struggle we have seen. It ended rather in a passive than in an active resignation. It did not bring Paul to his subsequent stage of glorying in tribulation; it only brought him to a state of mental quietude. He yielded himself up to the mighty power of God. He surrendered himself to the thought that this power might be magnified through the very weakness of its instrument, and that the very hindrance which his thorn undoubtedly presented to missionary success might serve still further to manifest the Divine glory. When Paul therefore emerged from Arabia, it was in the state of one who had experienced a restraining influence upon his sorrow. That sorrow had not been turned into joy, but it had been compelled to sleep. It had been forced to remain quiescent beneath the sense of a Divine all-ruling Will, whose purposes ad* mitted of no scrutiny, and from whose acts there could be no appeal.

But now I must observe that Paul himself never regarded his Arabian struggle as anything more than the initial stage of his conflict. He says of his thorn, in words more than once already referred to, “I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me.” The words seem to me to indicate that, to the retrospective experience of Paul, the struggle of his spiritual life embraced three distinct stages, comprehended three successive battle-fields in which he contended with the old enemy for different issues. The first of these conflicts is the Arabian struggle already described. As we have said, it was a struggle rather of the missionary than of the man. It was the effort of Paul to reconcile his call to apostleship with a sense of that ceremonial uncleanness which had been hitherto deemed a barrier to the service of the sanctuary. That battle-field had been won; the conscience of Paul had triumphed by putting itself under the will of the Highest. But, clearly, the victory which had been gained was as yet a very small one. The struggle which the apostle had experienced was only his struggle as an apostle. It was rather official than personal. It was awakened by the contrast between that work of grace which he was required to perform for others and that mark of Divine disfavour which he felt existing in himself. But sin has never perfectly revealed its sting until it reveals itself to the man as a man. Hitherto the personal life of Paul had been somewhat veiled from his sight by the appalling sense of his apostolic mission. It was comparatively easy to lull that storm to rest. From the standpoint of the Divine agency, the defectiveness or the perfectness of the human instrument was a matter of indifference; in the work of the apostleship God was all in all. But it was a very different matter when sin confronted the man, — when the problem before him was not how he should succeed in his work, but how he should be right in his conscience. Such a question, in the very nature of the case, cannot be solved by an appeal to the absolute power of God. The sphere of conscience is precisely that region in which He leaves a margin to the creature’s will. When the problem confronts a man in this direction, he requires to battle it out on human grounds, to weigh the testimony of his own heart, to wrestle with himself until the breaking of the day. Such was to be Paul’s second struggle. He was to meet with the shadow of his former self, to sec it no longer through a mere official veil, but face to face and man to man. He was to confront the spectacle of sin as sin — not in its ceremonial uncleanness, not in its liability to punishment, not in its disadvantageous consequences to a Christian apostle, but simply and solely in the unrest it occasions to a human mind.

I have called Paul’s first conflict the Arabian struggle, because its sphere was Arabia. Perhaps I shall not be far astray if I call his second con flict by the name of the Antiochian struggle. If Arabia was the scene of his Judaic Christianity, Antioch was probably the spot where his Judaism received its first serious check. That city was rapidly becoming the new centre of the Christian life. Jerusalem, which had been the parent stream of the Christian faith, was beginning to be left behind as the river of that faith broadened its banks. The shadow of the temple worship was receding, and the ark of the new covenant was being transplanted into another scene. That scene was Antioch. There was no spot in the world more unlike in every particular to the associations of Jerusalem. Jerusalem was the scene of unity; Antioch was the place of variety. Jerusalem revealed the necessity for a rigid agreement; Antioch displayed the impossibility of imposing such a concord. Jerusalem had room only for one phase of belief; Antioch was, by the very nature of its population, the sphere of many minds. Into this sphere Christianity had come at the very moment when Paul was passing through his first experience of struggle. The followers of Jesus were founding a new capital — a capital which was to be a more powerful centre for Christianity than ever Jerusalem had been for Judaism. Its comparative power was to lie in its comparative liberality. It was a soil fitted by its very nature to receive all manner of seeds, and to nourish growths of vastly different kinds. To plant Christianity there, was already to transplant it, to modify it, to enclose it in a new environment. It was impossible henceforth that it should ever be the rigid, narrow, monotonous thing which it had been in days of old. It was inevitable that it should become less Jewish and more human, and it was specially inevitable that the rite of circumcision, which had constituted a part of its original bond of fellowship, should be superseded and suppressed by the bond of Christian love.

We find, both from the narrative in the Acts and from the testimony of the epistles, that, within a few years of his conversion, Paul had already become part of the new Christian centre at Antioch. The significance of this fact for Paul, as well as for the other disciples, cannot be overrated. It was the entrance into a different atmosphere — an atmosphere rather larger than purer. It embraced, as we have seen, greater varieties of mind, but for that very reason it embraced greater susceptibilities to evil. Jerusalem had been a sphere of restrained vices. The heart of man there was no better than elsewhere; but there it was prevented from revealing itself as elsewhere. It was under the dominion of law, and of a law so rigid as to extend to the minutest details of human action. Put the soil gf

Antioch was essentially lawless. It was a sphere in which man had cast off all restraint, and had abandoned himself to the impulse of his own will. Nowhere, perhaps, in the lawless Gentile world had the spirit of licence taken so deep a hold. The passions of men seemed to have broken loose. Licentiousness, profligacy, immorality in every form, was rampant. All the bands of restraint by which religion imposes a fetter upon human vices had been long since rent asunder, and a specimen was given to the world of human nature in a state of spontaneous freedom. There could be no more fitting sphere in which to demonstrate the utter futility of the rite of circumcision as a moral educator of mankind. Hitherto human nature had not been seen in its strength by the Christian disciples; it had been seen only in that state of repression to which it had been reduced by a long subjection to law. Circumcision had got the credit of effecting more than it really did; it had been thought to subdue the passions which were already more than half conquered. But here, in this soil of Antioch, the case was very different. The passions of men were untamed, and the hearts of men were unaccustomed to control. What could a rite or ceremony do against the force of such a stream? It could only manifest its own impotence in the fact of being swept away. In the spectacle of human nature overflowing its embankments’ at Antioch, the Christian disciple must have awakened for the first time to the utter inadequacy and incompetence of Jewish ceremonialism, must have perceived for the first time how powerless to the

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salvation of the Gentiles was that ancient sacrament of circumcision, which had been for ages the symbol of admission into the national communion.

I am far from thinking, however, that in the abandonment of the rite of circumcision, Paul was merely or even mainly influenced by his geographical surroundings. Doubtless on him, as on others, the vehemence of human vices at Antioch produced a powerful sense that there was wanted a stronger than any physical restraint. But it seems to me that the ice of his Judaism was broken, not so much by looking on the sins of others as by a sudden awakening to the sense of his own. If it be asked why I regard Paul’s awakening to the sense of personal sin as an event contemporaneous with his entrance into Antioch, I must reply that I believe his personal conviction of sin to have reached its in tensest form only subsequently to the visit to Jerusalem alluded to in the previous chapter. The earliest revelation which Paul received was, as we have seen, not so much one of human guilt as of human equality. His first perception had been that of the risen Christ, and his vision of the risen Christ had mainly and primarily suggested only the claims of the Gentiles. In order to awaken Paul into a sense of personal sin, it was necessary that he should go back over that road which the original disciples had first travelled. He had only seen the Christ in His form of Divine exaltation; it was necessary that he should see Him in His form of earthly lowliness. His Christian education required, as we have said, to be a regress, a stepping backward over untrodden ground. Christ had only been brought before him in a superhuman aspect; he had to retrace his way into the scenes of His human ministry. He entered into these scenes for the first time when he went up to see Peter at Jerusalem. In his inter course with that disciple, and in his intercourse with the Lord’s brother, he came into his earliest contact with the man Christ Jesus. It was no longer an apparition in the clouds, it was no longer a light of supernatural radiance, — it was a human soul revealing the beauty of humanity, and revealing that beauty through the laws of natural development. In his intercourse with those brethren who had been with the Master in the days of His earthly struggle, Paul must have received his first impression of the inherent loveliness and the sublime sacrificial strength of the human life of Jesus.

Now there is no truth more intuitively certain than the fact that such a vision is necessary to a man’s sense of sin. It is a great mistake to imagine that any man can recognise himself to be living in a valley merely by being in the valley. He only comes to recognise the vale by having his eye cast upon the mountain; it is from the sense of height that he receives his impression of lowliness. And what is true in the world of nature, is true in the world of mind. It is equally true both in the intellectual and in the moral sphere. No man can arrive at a sense of his own ignorance except by receiving some rudiments of human knowledge; no man can arrive at a conviction of his own sinfumess except by coming into contact with a higher and a purer life. It is from the sight of moral beauty alone that a man can awaken to the conviction of his spiritual deformity; it is only from the vision of light that he can recognise the presence of his darkness. These are truths as experimentally certain as any mathematical axiom, and it is in their light that we ought to interpret the historical sequence of Paul’s spiritual experience. His vision of his own inherent depravity ought to be dated from his vision of the human loveliness of the Son of man. That vision only came to him in the day when the human life opened upon him, when he made a step backward from the Christ on the plains of Damascus to the Christ on the shores of Galilee. It took its rise from that visit to Jerusalem in which he came into personal contact with those who had both seen and handled the word of life, and was brought into personal fellowship with the immediate disciples of the Lord. Amid the solitudes of Arabia he had only communed with the Christ of supernatural power; in the companionship with Peter and James he received his first impressions of the moral strength and beauty of the Christ of history.

And with that vision he received at the same time his first impressions of his own moral turpitude. The sight of supernatural glory cannot awaken in man a sense of human degeneracy. Nothing but a human loveliness can impress a human soul with its own sin. It is from the vision of the human Christ, imparted during the fifteen days in Jerusalem, that I date the beginning of that personal struggle which left such a prominent impress on the apostle’s future life. The nature of that struggle will be found delineated in the seventh chapter of Romans. I have no doubt whatever that, although written in the present tense, this chapter is, and is intended to be, a biographical record. I do not read it as a statement of what was passing in the apostle’s mind at the time when he wrote the epistle, but as a narrative of what passed through his mind in the days when he was first awakened to the sense of the awful contrast between himself and the Son of man. He expresses it as a present experience, to indicate the vividness with which it still lived in his thoughts. It had left its imperishable marks upon him. Its memory was as fresh and green as if it had happened yesterday. As he thought of it, it seemed to him as if he were living over the struggle again — reproducing the pain of the old conflict, and undergoing the mental crucifixion of former years; and he expressed this sense of vividness by transforming the history into a description, and depicting the past experience as an event of the present hour.

Let it be observed that in the very heat of this mental struggle Paul never for a moment loses sight of the fact that the struggle itself was the result of a higher and not of a lower life; he says that sin assumed to him its fearful appearance, and worked in him the sense of death “by that which is good.” * He never for a moment doubts that his pain is the fruit of a higher joy, that his perception of the

i Rom. rti. 13.

valley comes from the sight of a mountain. That which has awakened him to the vision of his own deformity is itself a vision of beauty; it is Christ alone that has shown to him his distance from Christ. He has become the partaker of what might be called a double consciousness. There are two lives within him — one pointing to the heavens, and the other to the earth; and in the conflict of these two lives, he feels as if he were two men. But he never forgets the fact that the lower or earthly man has only come into consciousness by reason of the higher or heavenly one; the birth of the Christ within him has alone revealed the life of the first Adam. The higher life is to Paul his real self, the lower life is his imprisonment. His higher life has been born in a dungeon, and has come to the recognition of its chains. It feels itself to be in a position which it has no right to occupy. There is a contradiction between its will and its power of performance; it desires to be free, but its fetters impede its way. It has aspirations toward the true and good, but they are destroyed when they touch the chains of the prison-house. Paul has awakened to the sense of a deep antagonism in his own nature, — an internecine war between two lives which are striving for the mastery, and struggling for mutual extermination. His most prominent impression is a sense of utter helplessness, l i Who shall deliver me from this body of death?” He is more impressed with his helplessness than with his unworthiness. He feels that in the inner man he does delight in the law of God, and that, if left to his true self, he would be pure. He cries out for something to put him in a normal position, to restore him to his native freedom, to give him the right and the power to breathe his natural air; and the deepest grief of his soul proceeds from his perception that, in spite of the strength of his own desire, he is himself utterly unable to realise the aspiration of his heart.

Now, it is from this sense of helplessness that I date the first step of Paul’s real departure from Judaism. His first real departure from Judaism was not his acceptance of Christianity; neither he nor his Christian contemporaries ever dreamed that in embracing the faith of Jesus they were surpassing the faith of Israel. The beginning of Paul’s rupture with Judaism was his rejection of the doctrine of circumcision. We have seen that Paul’s Christianity had indeed produced a change in his attitude towards the national religion, but it was- a change in the direction of conservatism; he had only gone back from the legal to the patriarchal. When he emerged from Arabia, he was still an adherent of the faith of Abraham, and still held that the main portal into the temple was the gate of circumcision. But as he drew near to Antioch, and heard the diverse voices of many minds, he began to ask if this one gate would suit them all. As he drew nearer still, and beheld the unrestrained vices of many hearts, he began to ask if, even when admitted, this one gate would be fit to hold them in. Above all, as he turned his eye inwards upon that Jerusalem experience which he had gathered by the way, — as he thought of the new and human vision which he had received of Christ’s beauty from his fellowship with the primitive disciples, and as, by reason of that vision, there rose within him as there had never risen before, a sense of his personal deformity, he began to ask for the first time the most solemn question of all — Was the gate sufficient for himself?

The answer to that question was not difficult. It was impossible that Paul, when once awakened to a sense of the vehemence of the old life within him, could ever imagine that it could be restrained by such an embankment as circumcision. But if so, what then? If circumcision was not fitted to be an aid in restraining the passions of Christians, had it a right to have any place at all within the Christian system? If it was not calculated to be a gate of restraint, what claim could it have to be a gate of entrance? Were not the passions of the heart the result of a fleshly or carnal element? How could a carnal element be expelled by that which was itself carnal? Was not circumcision simply a ceremony of the flesh, and as such, how could it have any power over the spirit? Had there not been an error in retaining this old gate of Judaism? Were not the limits even of Arabia too narrow to be a basis for the creed of Christendom? Had not the time come in which it would be desirable to widen the portals of the Christian Church, and to admit future adherents within her pale upon larger and more spiritual grounds?

It is from this period that I date the beginning of what may distinctively be called Paul’s Gentile life. I say the beginning. I shall presently show that the Gentile life retained for a time a survival of Judaic culture. But meanwhile it is to be remarked that Paul now, for the first time, displays an antagonism to that which was the main object of the Jew’s religion — the flesh. To the mind of every Jew the test of religious sanctity was the wholeness of the outer man; it was precisely on this ground that Paul himself had uttered his first prayer in deprecation of his thorn. But at the present stage of his experience, the element of Paul’s former glory had become the element of his aversion. He had conceived for the first time a disposition towards asceticism — a desire to be emancipated from the world as a world: it is nothing less than this that breathes in the aspiration, “Who shall deliver me from this body of death?” His second prayer in deprecation of his thorn proceeded from exactly an opposite motive to that which had dictated his first. When first he “besought the Lord that it might depart” from him, it was because he was at that time resting under the Jewish con viction that the thorn was an interference with that wholeness of the flesh which the Jew above all things reverenced. But now when for the second time he beseeches the removal of his thorn, it is for precisely the contrary reason. It is because the flesh in every form has become to him an object of aversion, and because he looks upon his thorn as simply a manifestation of that flesh. If he had any longer believed it to be an interference with the carnal, he would at this stage have reverenced it; but he looked upon it as itself simply a part and illustration of that great principle of materialism which he had begun to re-Paul’s Second Struggle and its Result. 12T

gard as the enemy of the spirit, and from whose dominion and influence he was panting to be free.

What, then, was Paul’s refuge from this second struggle? We have seen his refuge from the first conflict. We have seen how, under the shadow of the Arabian mountains, his sense of missionary hope was stimulated anew by considering how his very disqualification must tend to magnify the power of God. Here was a conflict of a different kind, which needed a different close. The subject of Paul’s second struggle was not his inadequacy as a missionary, but his frailty as a man, and his frailty by reason of that flesh which, in the view of the old religion, had constituted his glory. The problem was, how was Paul to get free from this flesh? — who was to deliver him from its body of death? Was there any hope of an emancipation? — any prospect, in the nature of things, that a time would come in which the fetters of the spirit would be struck off, and the soul would dwell aloft in the region of its own uninterrupted purity?

In the view of Paul there was such a prospect. I have said that this present stage of his experience grew out of his first reaction against Judaism; yet, strangely enough, it was from Judaism itself that he received his earliest solution of the problem. In breaking away from the old religion, he did not break from it instantaneously; in emancipating him self from its present surroundings, he found his im mediate refuge in its Messianic hope. It is at this stage that Paul enters upon that phase of religious experience which a few years afterwards appears so conspicuously in his Epistles to the Thessalonians, and which constitutes the earliest epistolary land mark we possess of his spiritual development. We have seen that he was first presented to Christianity in its supramundane form. The Christ whom he saw on the plains of Damascus was really the Christ of the future, — Christianity emancipated from all local conditions. It is not surprising that a man, whose first vision of Christianity had been the vision of its immortalising power, should have fixed his first Christian hope upon the fact of immortality. Christ was to him not an earthly memory. He was unassociated to his mind with the record of any human experience; he knew Him only as in the future He was to be. Is it wonderful that to him the future should have contained all his hope? Is it wonder ful that, in his inability to go back into the scenes of the human history, his aspirations should have pressed forward into scenes not yet historical, and should have revelled in the prospective joys of days that were still to come.

This, then, was Paul’s second refuge from that thorn in the flesh which had become to him the representative of the flesh itself. The world was to him a scene of misery; but there was another world. He was living in a state of things which made the bearing of life itself a cross; but there was coming another state of things which would reverse all present conditions. The sufferings of the Messiah had been accepted in the room of the ancient sacrifices, and through their acceptance prosperity had been secured to mankind. But it never occurred to Paul at this stage of his experience that the benefits of the Christian sacrifice were to take effect here and now. It was to a. future sphere that he looked for the glorious results of the reconciliation between God and man. This earth as it stood was to him incapable of reconciliation, — it wanted renewal through its whole centre and circumference. Nothing but an abolition of the present system of things could remedy the evils of the flesh, or make it a fit tabernacle for the indwelling of the Divine Spirit. The first coming must be supplemented by a second. Paul, indeed, was not peculiar here; he held it in common with all the disciples. But his peculiarity lay in the fact that to him the second coming seemed, in order of time, to have taken precedence of the first. The Christ whom he saw at Damascus had been rather the Christ of the return than the Christ of the original advent; he had been born out of due time, in the sense that he had been privileged to witness the earliest of those manifestations which his contemporaries referred to the latter times. It is not surprising, therefore, that his gaze should originally have fastened upon the second coming, almost to the exclusion of the first. He was as yet in the days of his spiritual youth, and he had that experience which is common to all youth — the tendency to see the future at the door, and to behold it with out perspective. To-morrow was in its impression more vivid than to-day, and to the interests and claims of to-morrow the mind and heart of the apostle were absorbingly directed. That such is the prevailing tone of Paul’s mind at this period will be apparent to any one who studies carefully the spirit and tenor of his two epistles to the Thessalonians. It would not represent the tenor of these epistles to say that they contain many references to the second coming; they are themselves essentially and exclusively epistles of the second coming. They breathe and exhale the atmosphere of a life that is to be. They are not, indeed, speculative in tone, but purely practical; yet their practical element itself is founded upon grounds not of the present but of the future, and the virtues which are most commended are those which stretch into that future. The Thessalonian converts are exhorted to an attitude of waiting. They are incited to a spirit of hope.2 They are enjoined to cultivate a spotless life, that they may be pure in the sight of the second advent.8 They are commanded to put a restraint upon their sorrow in the vision of the approaching joy.4 They are asked to maintain a watchful demeanour in the light of the imminence of this revelation.5 The recompense they are required to look for is a recompense entirely beyond the present scene of things, one which is only to be reaped when the present scene shall have passed away.6 So far from expecting their harvest from the ripening and development of the world in which they move, their greatest hope of a harvest is to be found in the sense of that world’s moral retrogression and apostasy.7 It is not surprising that, as the sum and consummation

i 1 Thess. 1. 10. 2 1 These, ii. 19. 3 1 Thess. 111. 13.

* 1 Thess. iv. 13 et teq. 6 1 Thess. v. 1 et seq.

2 Thess. i. 5-10. 7 2 Thess. 11. 1 et teq.

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of the whole, the Christian virtue which shines as a star in the kingdom of the Father is the virtue of expectant endurance, and that, in predominance over all other things, they are asked to cultivate the ’ ‘patience of Christ. “l

Such, according to Paul at this stage of his history, was to be the first effect of the Christian sacrifice. The sacrificial life and death of the Son of man had taken the place of the Jewish offerings, and had purchased, alike for Jew and Gentile, a reconciliation to the favour of heaven. But whereas to the Jew the favour of heaven was manifested in the things that are seen and temporal, it was by the mind of Paul referred to the things that are not seen and eternal. It did not occur to him at this stage of his experience to look for the fruits of Divine reconciliation in an improvement and a development in the constitution of the present world. From the constitution of the present world his mind had experienced a revolt. There was a rupture between his sympathies and the works and ways of men. A hard and fast line had been drawn between his conception of what actually was, and his conception of what ought to be; and it did not as yet enter into his thoughts to conceive the possibility of a Divine advent, whose professed object should be to restore and renovate the existing fabric. The existing fabric was destined to pass away. Every stage of its history was to be a stage downwards, a step nearer to the completion of its process of dissolution. The scene of man’s amelioration was to be a new heaven

i 2 These, ill. 5.

and a new earth. Physical nature and human nature had alike proved themselves inadequate to the restoration of the Divine image; in the destruction of physical nature, and in the transformation of human nature, could the restoration of that image alone be found.

The position here assumed by Paul is at first sight one of worldly pessimism. And yet, a deeper reflection will show us that in its essence it was not so. Looked at from his present attitude, Paul might be regarded as an ascetic, as a man whose only desire was to be emancipated from contact with material forms. And yet in reality nothing could be further from the fact; strictly speaking, the reverse was true. So far from wanting to be emancipated from material forms Paul desired to enjoy with these forms a closer and a more blameless contact. However much he had broken with the doctrine of circumcision, he had far from broken with the secular hope of the Jewish nation. He had accepted Christ as the realisation of the Messianic idea, but he had accepted Him in His most Messianic and Judaic aspect. He saw in Him one who had purchased by a Divine sacrifice a future inheritance of temporal glory, whose fulness and completeness would compensate for the dearth and barrenness of the present scene. It was no mystical inheritance on which his mind was now set. It was’ a world such as his countrymen had loved to picture — a world of thrones and principalities and powers, in which the highest seats would be reserved for the best men. It was a land which should realise the dreams of patriarch and prophet — a land flowing with milk and honey, abundant with the fruits of plenty and of peace. It was a country which should be the highway of the nations, the focus of culture, the meeting-place for all the products of human civilisation — a region in whose prosperity the prosperity of the surrounding earth would be secured. Paul’s hope of the second advent was a secular hope, and his reason for desiring it was his attraction towards the secular. If he had despised the flesh, if he had looked down upon materialism in itself, he would have seen in its abasement no ground for regret. It was because he did not despise the flesh, it was because he saw in the material world the possibility of better things, that he desired the advent of these better things. It was precisely because in principle he was no ascetic, that he longed for the abolition of what he believed to be the corruption of God’s way upon the earth; it was his hope for a new and a higher physical world that prompted him to pray that the present system of things might come to an end.