St. Paul has concluded his great exposition of the meaning of 'the gospel': that in it is the disclosure of a divine righteousness into which all mankind—Jews and Gentiles on the same level of need and sin—are to be freely admitted by simply believing in Jesus. The believer in Jesus first welcomes the absolute and unmerited forgiveness of his sins, which his redeemer has won for him, and thus acquitted passes into the spiritual strength and joy and fellowship of the new life, the life of the redeemed humanity, lived in Jesus Christ, the second Adam or head of our race. The contemplation of the present moral freedom, and the glorious future prospect, of this catholic body—the elect of God in Jesus Christ—has in the eighth chapter filled the apostle's language with the glow of an enthusiasm almost unparalleled in all the compass of his epistles. And he is intending to pass on to interpret to the representatives of this church of Christ at Rome some of the moral obligations which follow most clearly from the consideration of what their faith really means. This ethical division of the epistle begins with chapter xii. The interval (ix-xi) is occupied with a discussion which is an episode, in the sense that the epistle might be read without it and no feeling of a broken unity would force itself upon us. None the less the discussion not only confronts and silences an obvious objection to St. Paul's teaching, but also brings out ideas about the meaning of the divine election, and the responsibility involved in it, which are vital and necessary for the true understanding of the 'free grace of God.' For these chapters serve really to safeguard the all-important sense of our human responsibility under the rich and unmerited conditions of divine privilege in which we find ourselves.
St. Paul's argument so far has involved an obvious conclusion. God's elect are no longer the Jews in particular. On the contrary, the Jews in bulk have lost their position and become apostates in rejecting the Christ. This result in the first place cuts St. Paul to the heart, for his religious patriotism was peculiarly intense. But in the second place it furnishes an objection in the mouth of the Jew against St. Paul's whole message. For if God had really rejected His chosen people, He had broken His word in so doing. God had pledged Himself to Israel: the Old Testament scriptures were full of passages which might be quoted to this effect. Thus—
'My mercy will I not utterly take from David
'Nor suffer my faithfulness to fail.
'My covenant will I not break,
'Nor alter the thing that is gone out of my lips.
'Once have I sworn by my holiness;
'I will not lie unto David;
'His seed shall endure for ever,
'And his throne as the sun before me.
'It shall be established for ever as the moon,
'And as the faithful witness in the sky[1].'
But according to St. Paul's teaching, had not God 'broken His covenant'? What had become of the 'faithful witness'? To this objection, then, St. Paul sets himself to reply. The chapters we are now to consider may be best represented as an animated defence of his teaching directed toward a Jew who pleads this objection. St. Paul, no doubt, had heard too much of it since he began to preach the gospel, and had felt it too deeply in his own mind in the earlier days, when the word of Jesus was as a goad against which he was kicking, for it to be possible for him to pass it by. And his defence—his 'theodicy' or justification of God—is in brief this: God never committed Himself or tied Himself to Israel physically understood. He always kept hanging over their heads declarations of His own freedom in choosing His instruments, and warnings of possible rejection, such as ought to have prevented their resting satisfied with merely having 'Abraham to their father' (ix). And if the question be asked: Why has Israel been rejected? The answer is: That so far as actual Israel has fallen out of the elect body, it is because they refused to exhibit the correspondence of faith (x); but also Israel, as such, has not been rejected; for, as of old, so now there is a faithful remnant. Nor again is the partial alienation of Israel which has occurred final. God is simply waiting for their recovery of faith, to restore them to their ancient and inalienable position of election. Meanwhile He uses their temporary alienation as the opportunity of the Gentiles, who in their turn can only retain their newly won position by maintaining the correspondence of faith with the purposes of God, and who also wait for their fulfilment and the perfecting of their joy upon the recovery of Israel as a body. Thus through all stages of election and rejection—by both methods of mercy and of judgement—God, in His inscrutable wisdom, works steadily for the opportunity of showing His mercy upon all men.
When we have a brief analysis of the argument of these chapters under our eyes, we may well rub them in astonishment, and look again, and ask why, in the reaction against Calvinism[2], we had come (to put it frankly) to dislike these chapters so much. We know that as a fact these chapters have been taken as a stronghold of the Calvinistic position by both its friends and foes. They have come to constitute in modern literature a sort of reproach upon Christianity[3], just on the ground on which the best Christian conscience of our time is most sensitive. Many of us would have to admit that we have shrunk from these chapters as we have heard them read, and probably avoided them in our own reading. We have shrunk from the sound of the words—'the children being not yet born, neither having done anything good or bad, that the purpose of God according to election might stand, not of works but of him that calleth'—'Jacob have I loved, and Esau have I hated'—'Whom he will he hardeneth'—'Hath not the potter power over the clay.' Yet these texts, with their arbitrary, unfair and narrow sound, appear as steps in an argument which has for its conclusion the most universal conception possible of the purpose of the divine love. 'God shut up all unto disobedience, that he might have mercy upon all.' The conclusion of the argument is so unmistakable, and so plain against any Calvinistic attribution to God of a narrow and arbitrary favouritism, that there must have been some great mistake in our understanding of its main point and drift. It is worth while then to indicate at starting where the error has lain.
1. It has been in part owing to our mistaken habit of taking isolated 'texts' out of their connexion, as if they were detached aphorisms. Now St. John, in his meditative method, does very generally round off a fundamental Christian truth into an aphorism which really admits of being detached and quoted apart from its context. And no doubt there are in St. Paul detachable texts. But on the whole St. Paul, least of all men, admits of being judged by detached fragments. His thought is always in process. It looks before and after. He is seriously wronged by the mere fact of his epistles being divided into separate verses, and sometimes arbitrary chapters, as in the Authorized Version. Thus in the case of these three chapters, the common mistake as to the meaning of particular phrases could hardly have arisen if the argument had been kept in mind as a whole, and especially its conclusion as to the universal purpose of divine love—'to have mercy upon all.'
2. For, among other things, the true meaning of 'election' in these chapters would then have been apparent. St. Paul has been popularly misunderstood to be referring to God's 'election' of some individual men to salvation in heaven, and His abandonment of the rest to hell. Whereas the argument as a whole and its conclusion make it quite certain that what he is speaking of is the election of men in nations or churches (only subordinately of individuals)[4] to a position of special spiritual privilege and responsibility in this world, such as the Jews had formerly occupied, and the Christians were occupying now—an election to be the people of God, and bear His name in the face of the world—the sort of election which carries with it a great joy and a special opportunity, but not by any means a certainty of final personal acceptableness to God, apart from moral faithfulness. Apart from such faithfulness the 'children of the kingdom shall be cast into the outer darkness,' and the highest shall be put lowest, while the lowest are raised highest.
3. Another cause of misunderstanding has been forgetfulness of the point of view of the opponent with whom St. Paul is arguing. In modern times assertions of divine absoluteness, like St. Paul's, have been made by teachers who were refusing to recognize any such freedom of the will in the individual human being—any such power to control his own personal destiny—as seems to our common sense to be involved in moral responsibility in any real sense. St. Paul has therefore been supposed, like these more recent teachers, to be asserting divine absoluteness, or the unrestricted freedom of divine choice, as against human freedom, or in such a way as to destroy the idea of moral responsibility. But in fact St. Paul is vindicating moral responsibility. His opponent is the Jew, who holds that God had so tied His hands and lost His liberty in choosing Israel once for all for His elect people, that every child of Abraham can at all times claim the privileges of his election for no other reason than because of his genealogy. Such a doctrine of election does indeed destroy all real moral responsibility in the subject of it, and all freedom of moral choice in God. St. Paul, on the other hand, asserts that God remains free and absolute to elect and to reject, irrespective of all questions of race, where He will and as He will. The absolute reason of God's selections, the reason why certain races and individuals are chosen for special privileges and as special instruments of the divine purpose, lies in a region into which we cannot penetrate. But because God has shown us His moral character and requirement, we can know how, and how only, we may hope to retain any position which God has given us; it is by exhibiting moral correspondence with His purpose—that is faith—or malleability under His hand.
This is a doctrine then which lays upon 'the elect,' at any particular moment, the moral responsibility of correspondence with a divine purpose. In a word, St. Paul asserts divine sovereignty in such a sense as vindicates instead of destroying moral responsibility, while his opponent is claiming for Israel a sort of freedom from being interfered with, which would really destroy their moral responsibility altogether. Thus, as has already been pointed out[5], nothing can well be more important than to keep clearly in mind, here as elsewhere, with whom St. Paul is arguing.
4. It is worth while remarking, before we apply ourselves to St. Paul's argument in detail, that it is essentially 'apologetic': it is a justification of God in view of certain felt difficulties: and it is an argument ad hominem, that is an argument with certain people on their own assumptions, the sort of argument which takes the form of saying, 'you at least have no right on your own principles to urge such and such difficulties.' Now we are bound to recognize how very important at all periods this ad hominem appeal is: how very important it is to get men to see what their own principles really involve. A great part of the evil of the world comes through people not thinking out what they really mean and believe. But on the other hand, this sort of argument, which proceeds upon a certain set of assumptions, has often a merely temporary force, and carries with it an accompanying danger. When the state of mind contemplated becomes a matter of history, the argument based on its assumption has lost its power. In view of a quite different set of assumptions it may become even misleading. For example, Bishop Butler argued for the truths of natural and revealed religion, on the analogy of the facts of nature and on the assumption of a divine author of nature, thus—If, as you admit, God made nature, and yet nature is shown to contain such and such facts or processes, how can you argue against the divine authorship of natural religion and revelation on the ground that it attributes to God similar facts and processes? This was a very effective argument so long as men did treat the doctrine of God having created the world as a matter of course. But when 'agnosticism' arose—when men ceased to discover in nature any decisive argument for God or against God, and professed only an inability to draw any conclusion at all, Butler's argument had lost its force, and the difficulties in nature and religion to which he called attention could even be used against ascribing a divine authorship to either. Apologetic arguments are always liable to this peril. Thus St. Paul's arguments, based on an unhesitating belief that the Old Testament contained really the words of God, that what they asserted about God was certainly true, and that God was certainly just and the standard of justice, may have an effect very contrary to his intention when they are applied to people who feel no such certainties. St. Paul may seem to be making the difficulties of believing in the Bible only more obvious, by calling attention to its 'harsh and unedifying' elements.
But this unfortunate result of most 'apologies' is, at least in the case of St. Paul and Bishop Butler, only superficial. If the apologetic argument is really deep, it retains, if not exactly its original value, yet a value not the less real. Butler's indications of the profound analogy which holds between the doctrines of religion and the facts of nature, can never be out of place or lose force. Still less can men ever cease to learn the deepest lessons from his temper of mind and method. And that it is so with St. Paul's apology—that it contains the profoundest and most abiding lessons about the responsibility and danger of all elect bodies and individuals—will appear plainly enough in what follows, now that we are in a position to approach his argument in detail.
[1] Ps. lxxxix. 33–7.
[2] By this phrase is commonly meant the doctrine that God created some men absolutely and irresistibly predestined to eternal life and joy, and created the rest of mankind absolutely and hopelessly abandoned to eternal misery.
[3] Matthew Arnold, St. Paul and Protestantism (Smith, Elder, 1870), p. 99, admits that St. Paul 'falls into Calvinism,' but patronizingly excuses him on the ground that this Calvinism is with him secondary, or even less than secondary.
[4] Of course the election of the nation or the church is felt, especially in the New Testament, or whenever in the Old Testament individuality is fully realized, to involve the election of each of the persons composing the nation or the church. But still their election is a challenge to their faith, and no guarantee of ultimate salvation. St. Paul is left praying and suffering 'for the elect's sake that they also may obtain the salvation … with eternal glory' (2 Tim. ii. 10). The elect have to 'make their calling and election sure' (2 Peter i. 10). It should, however, be noticed that election may be, and in the Gospels is, used to describe the final selection of those who are proved worthy of the 'marriage supper of the Lamb.' (Matt. xxii. 14.)
[5] Vol. i. pp. 114 f.
St. Paul has finished his glowing description of the position and prospects of the elect people of God. And then, by contrast, the misery of the outcast people once called elect—his own people—wrings his heart with pain. The very idea that in his new enthusiasm for the catholic church he can be supposed to be forgetting those who are of his own flesh and blood, stirs him to a profound protest. He solemnly asseverates that the pain which Israel's rejection causes him is acute and continuous. He has caught himself at the point of praying to be himself an outcast from Christ, if so be he could bring the people of his own kindred and blood into the Church. For who indeed could seem to have so good a title to be there? They are the Israelites—that is God's own people: the eye of God was so specially upon this race that He redeemed it and made it His own son[1]: to them was vouchsafed the shining of His continual presence in the tabernacle[2]: to them, in the persons of the patriarchs and of Moses, God gave special covenants, that is to say, pledged His word to them in an unmistakable manner and repeatedly that He should be their God and they should be His people: thus in pursuance of a divine purpose they were brought under the education of the divinely given law and ritual worship: and all this with direct and repeated promises of a more glorious position in the future to be brought about by the divine king, the Christ who was to be. To them finally belongs all the sanctity which can attach to a people from having numbered among its members the holy ones of God: for of this race were the patriarchs, the friends of God; and of this race, so far as human birth is concerned, came in fact the Christ who, born a Jew, is sovereign of the universe and ever blessed God. Surely then, St. Paul implies, that this race, now that the Christ they were expecting is at last come, now that the goal of all God's dealings with them is at last reached, should have fallen outside the circle of His people and be no longer sharers in the sonship or the election, would seem a result too monstrous to contemplate. The contrast between what they were and were intended for, and what in present appearance they are, is indeed appalling.
Yet the natural conclusion for the Jew to draw, which at this point flashes into St. Paul's mind, the conclusion that God has proved unfaithful, is not the true one. No: God's word, God's promise, has not broken down. For, if the facts are looked at, it appears quite plainly that the Israel of God was never simply the Israel of physical descent, nor the children of Abraham simply his physical seed. Plainly not. For Isaac and Ishmael were equally Abraham's seed, physically considered, but for the purpose of God the promise is given only to the family of the younger son, Isaac (Gen. xxi. 12), who moreover was born, not in the mere natural order, but under circumstances of special divine promise and intervention (Gen. xviii. 10). And if in this case it be said that the younger son Isaac was the only son of Sarah, the wife and free woman, and therefore had a natural prerogative over Ishmael, yet the same inscrutable principle of selection is apparent in the next generation, in a case where there is no possible inequality of natural claim—in the case of the two sons born simultaneously to Isaac of the same mother. Prior to their birth, and prior therefore to any possible merit or demerit on their own part—so that God's absolute freedom of choice should appear quite conspicuously—the younger Jacob was deliberately preferred over the elder Esau (Gen. xxv. 23). And in fact this race of Esau, this Edom—though they were Israelites after the flesh—appear in history as something much worse than merely secondary to the true Israel; for God speaks by Malachi and declares that, whereas Israel is His beloved son, Esau, that is Edom, He has 'hated' (Mal. i. 3). No Israelite therefore who reads his scriptures (St. Paul would conclude) ought to have failed to perceive an inscrutable element in God's choice of his chosen people. He ought not to have felt in his own case, any more than in that of the first children of Abraham or Isaac, that he could be sure of membership in the people of God merely because of his physical descent.
I say the truth in Christ, I lie not, my conscience bearing witness with me in the Holy Ghost, that I have great sorrow and unceasing pain in my heart. For I could wish[3] that I myself were anathema from Christ for my brethren's sake, my kinsmen according to the flesh: who are Israelites; whose is the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises; whose are the fathers, and of whom is Christ as concerning the flesh, who is over all, God blessed for ever. Amen. But it is not as though the word of God hath come to nought. For they are not all Israel, which are of Israel: neither, because they are Abraham's seed, are they all children: but, In Isaac shall thy seed be called. That is, it is not the children of the flesh that are children of God; but the children of the promise are reckoned for a seed. For this is a word of promise, According to this season will I come, and Sarah shall have a son. And not only so; but Rebecca also having conceived by one, even by our father Isaac—for the children being not yet born, neither having done anything good or bad, that the purpose of God according to election might stand, not of works, but of him that calleth, it was said unto her, The elder shall serve the younger. Even as it is written, Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.
1. St. Paul's earnest asseveration is very noticeable in form. It shows so much of his instinctive inward life. He lives 'in Christ,' who is light as well as life[4], and to speak the truth is the very atmosphere of this new life[5]. As it comes natural to many people to say 'upon my word as a gentleman,' it comes natural to St. Paul to say, 'speaking as in Christ, who is the light.' And his natural conscience—that is the faculty of passing judgement on one's own actions, which in St. Paul's case bears witness to the truth of what he says by passing no censure on him—that too does not act of itself merely, but in the Spirit of the new life, the Holy Spirit of Christ, which inspires and ratifies the moral judgement, otherwise so liable to be degraded or perverted or silenced: his conscience bears witness with his word in the Holy Ghost. Here, then, is the whole secret of Christian truthfulness. The Christian is truthful because he lives and speaks in God, in Christ, in the Spirit.
As to St. Paul's half-expressed prayer ('I was praying,' he says, i.e. 'I caught myself praying'), it resembles that of Moses for his rebellious people[6]. 'And now, O Lord, if thou wilt forgive their sin—; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written.' But St. Paul's instinctive desire is not apparently like that of Moses, to perish with his people rather than be saved without them; but to offer himself for rejection with a view to their salvation. The prayer is, as St. Paul implies, an impossible prayer, but it expresses, as hardly anything else could, the intensity of his feeling. And such intensity of feeling was natural to the deep religious patriotism of a Jew.
We may illustrate St. Paul's feeling by comparing a fine expression of a more commonplace sorrow over the ruin of Israel from a period after the destruction of Jerusalem[7]. 'Now therefore I will speak; touching man in general, thou knowest best; but touching thy people will I speak, for whose sake I am sorry; and for thine inheritance, for whose cause I mourn; and for Israel, for whom I am heavy; and for the seed of Jacob, for whose sake I am troubled.' 'Thou seest that our sanctuary is laid waste, our altar broken down, our temple destroyed; our psaltery is brought low, our song is put to silence, our rejoicing is at an end; the light of our candlestick is put out, the ark of our covenant is spoiled, our holy things are defiled, and the name that is called upon us is profaned; our freemen are despitefully treated, our priests are burnt, our Levites are gone into captivity, our virgins are defiled, and our wives ravished; our righteous men carried away, our little ones betrayed, our young men are brought into bondage, and our strong men are become weak; and, what is more than all, the seal of Sion—for she hath now lost the seal of her honour, and is delivered into the hands of them that hate us.'
2. As we read St. Paul's enumeration of the glories of Israel, it is of course obvious for us to pursue the line of thought taught us elsewhere by St. Paul, and in the Epistle to the Hebrews; and to recognize how each element of the 'glory,' which belonged once to the Jewish 'ministration of condemnation,' belongs in deeper and fuller measure to the Christian 'ministration of the Spirit[8].' Ours is the vocation of the chosen people; ours is the sonship to God; and the perpetual presence; and the security of divine covenant; ours is the divine law, and with it, what is much better, the Spirit for its accomplishment; ours is the corporate worship in spirit and in truth, the Church's eucharist; for us, too, are promises which the realization of those of the first covenant has made 'more sure'; ours finally is the communion of the saints from Abraham onward into the body of Christ. And in proportion therefore to the greatness of our privileges, even as compared with those of the older covenant, is the greatness of our responsibility; 'For I would not, brethren, have you ignorant[9],' St. Paul would say; he would not have us fail to profit by the warnings of old days. And another voice warns us 'Of how much sorer punishment shall he be thought worthy, who hath trodden under foot the Son of God, and hath counted the blood of the covenant, wherewith he was sanctified, an unholy thing, and hath done despite unto the Spirit of grace[10].'
3. There has been amongst critics, since Erasmus, much controversy over the clause, 'who is over all, God blessed for ever.' There is no doubt that it is translated most naturally, and most agreeably to the balance and movement of the sentence, if we attribute it to Christ, as above. But many critics, including some who were orthodox, have stumbled at the idea of St. Paul speaking of Christ straight out as 'over all, God blessed for ever.' Generally no doubt 'God' is used by St. Paul as a proper name of the Father. But Christ is continually recognized as possessing strictly divine attributes, and exercising strictly divine functions; and in all St. Paul's epistles, beginning with his earliest to the Thessalonians, He is God's Son, His own or proper Son[11]. His blood, as shed for our ransoming, is God's own blood, or (possibly) the blood of one who is 'His own'[12]. He subsisted eternally in the form, or essential attributes, of God, and in possession of equality with Him; and He possesses now, as glorified in humanity, the divine name of universal sovereignty, the object of universal worship[13]. Therefore He is in the strictest sense divine; and whatever or, I should say, whoever is essentially divine and proper to the being of God, can rightly be called God. For, indeed, there is nothing in the strict sense divine but God Himself. It was then merely a question of time when Christians would become sufficiently familiar with the new revelation of the threefold name to apply the word God to the Son and the Spirit as naturally as to the Father. And there is nothing really to surprise us in St. Paul here applying it to Christ[14]: nothing certainly to warrant us in doing violence to the sentence, in order to obviate the conclusion that he did so, by putting a full stop after 'flesh,' and then supposing an abrupt exclamation 'He who is over all is God blessed for ever[15]!'
Let it be recognized, then, that St. Paul here plainly speaks of Christ as 'over all,' i.e. in His glorified manhood, and also as 'God blessed for ever'—that is, as the one proper and eternal object of human praise; and that he speaks of Him again elsewhere[16], as 'our great God and Saviour.' It was only because He was essentially and eternally 'God' that He could, in our manhood and as the reward of His human obedience, be exalted to divine sovereignty and be 'over all.'
4. In the rest of the section St. Paul is arguing with a Jew, who makes the claim that because of the divine covenant God is bound to the Israelites, and to all Israelites for ever. 'We have Abraham to our father,' and that is enough[17]. The higher prophetic spirit of the Old Testament had already realized that God's election of Israel was a challenge to her to prove herself worthy of an undeserved privilege[18], and that, though a faithful remnant would never fail, yet unfaithfulness in the bulk of the nation would bring destruction upon them and loss of God's favour[19]. The prophetic spirit had realized also that God's servant Israel was not 'called' for his own selfish honour's sake, but was entrusted with a divine ministry to fulfil for all the nations of the earth[20]. It is to this higher sense of what Israel's position meant, and the perils it involved, that John the Baptist and our Lord Himself had sought to recall the Jews. They must not 'think to say within themselves, They had Abraham for their Father; for God was able of the stones to raise up children unto Abraham.' For 'many should come from the east and the west, and sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of God, and the sons of the kingdom should be cast into the outer darkness[21].' But it is evident that this higher meaning of the doctrine of election had been forgotten by contemporary Judaism, and they would not be recalled to it. They refused to contemplate the spiritual risk of missing their vocation, or the universal purpose for which it was given. They chose to think that Israel, i.e. the actual Israelites in bulk, must remain God's elect; that the Christ, when He came, must come to exalt their race and nation: that they were bound to inherit the blessings of the world to come: that the divine government of the world existed for their sakes[22].
St. Paul, then, is here intending to vindicate the real meaning of election, in the sense in which it is bound up with the ethical character of God and carries with it a deepened feeling of responsibility in those who are the subjects of it. But his argument is directed, first of all, to one point only—to bringing the eyes of the Jews straight up to their own scriptures, and forcing them to see that they do not justify the idea of election purely by race. It is not all of a certain seed, but only part of it, that is chosen. There is nothing to hinder a great part of the race again becoming as Ishmael or as Edom by the side of Israel. Ultimately, no doubt, there are two points to be proved. First, that God's method of choosing an elect body to be His people in the world is inscrutable, so that we cannot produce or determine His election by any calculation, or by any real or supposed merits, of ours; secondly, that though we cannot create our vocation, we can retain it by moral correspondence or faith, and by that only. But at present it is only the first point that is insisted upon—the absolute, inscrutable element in the divine choice. And that, we should notice, is a fact not merely of scriptural evidence but of common experience. Men are born to higher and lower positions of privilege and opportunity. They are born Jacobs or Esaus, in respect of moral, intellectual, religious, or physical endowment—with ten talents, or five, or two, or one; and God does not often give us so much as a glimpse of the reason why. All He does make clear to us is that the determination of human vocations, higher or lower, is in wiser hands than ours.
It is of course evident, as has already been said, that what St. Paul is speaking about is the election of men, and specially races or nations of men, to a position of spiritual privilege in this world. We know now, better than the Jews of the Old Covenant could know it, that behind all the apparent injustices and inequalities of this world lies the rectifying equity of God. St. Peter had come to believe that the divine mercy had rectified in the world beyond death the apparently rough and heavy handed judgement upon the rejected mass of mankind in the time of the Flood. That physical catastrophe at least was an instrument of mercy in disguise[23]. St. Paul believed the same about all God's rejections, as well as elections, in this world. They served one universal purpose: 'That he might have mercy upon all[24].' But all the same here and now in this world God does work by means of enormous inequalities. There are Jacobs whom He plainly loves, upon whom He showers all His richest blessings, and Esaus whom, to judge from present evidence, we should say He hates—whom He sets to live in hardest and most cramping surroundings. And no man can determine which lot he shall enjoy. That lies in the inscrutable selectiveness of God.
That there is no question at all about the eternal welfare of the individual Esau's soul—that the question is simply of the comparative status of Israel and Edom in this world—appears plainly in the passage of Malachi, which St. Paul quotes. And we must notice how unexpected an application St. Paul gives to this passage in a direction most unfamiliar to Jewish thought. For Edom was to the Jew the very type of all that was most hateful. He anticipated for the Edomites God's worst vengeance, as for Israel God's best blessings. But St. Paul forces him to think—Why should he assume that he will be better off than Edom? Edom was once physically on Israel's level, or his superior in claim, when their first fathers were but just born infants. But God chose one and not the other. He may exercise the like unscrutable selectiveness upon the seed of Israel to-day. And Edom did not remain in a merely secondary position. He sank to be a byword for all that is most hateful to God. Be warned, St. Paul would say, it may be that 'with change of name the tale is told of thee[25].'
[1] Exod. iv. 23; Hos. xi. 1.
[2] Exod. xvi. 10.
[3] Or 'pray' (marg.) literally 'I was praying.'
[4] Cf. Eph. v. 8–14.
[5] Cf. Col. iii. 9.
[6] Exod. xxxii. 32.
[7] 2 Esdr. viii. 15–16, x. 21–23. The latter passage is not spoken to God, but by one Jew to another.
[8] 2 Cor. iii. 8.
[9] See 1 Cor. x. 1–13.
[10] Heb. x. 29.
[11] 1 Thess. i. 10; Rom. viii. 3.
[12] Acts xx. 28.
[13] Phil. ii. 6–11.
[14] Without the article which makes it a proper name of the Father.
[15] R. V. margin2. It does further violence to the Greek to translate as R. V. margin1, 'He who is God over all is (be) blessed for ever.' I have nothing to add on the matter to S. and H. in loc., especially p. 236.
[16] Tit. ii. 13. This is probably the right rendering.
[17] St. Matt. iii. 9.
[18] Great stress was laid by the prophets on the absence of any original merit or power in Israel, which caused the divine election; see Ezek. xvi, Deut. xxvi. 5.
[19] See especially Amos ix. 7–10: 'Are ye not as the children of the Ethiopians unto me, O children of Israel? saith the Lord. Have not I brought up Israel out of the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor, and the Syrians from Kir? Behold, the eyes of the Lord God are upon the sinful kingdom, and I will destroy it from off the face of the earth; saving that I will not utterly destroy the house of Jacob, saith the Lord. For, lo, I will command, and I will sift the house of Israel among all the nations, like as corn is sifted in a sieve, yet shall not the least grain fall upon the earth. All the sinners of my people shall die by the sword, which say, The evil shall not overtake nor prevent us.'
[20] Gen. xii. 3; Isa. lxvi. 18; Zech. viii. 23, &c.
[21] Matt. viii. 11, 12.
[22] In Weber's Jüdische Theologie (Leipzig, 1897, formerly called System der Altsynagog. Palästin. Theol. or Die Lehre des Talmud), pp. 51 ff, there are striking illustrations from the Talmud of this fixed tendency of thought among the Jews. Thus 'there exists no clearer proof of the Talmudic conviction of the absolutely holy character of Israel than that in all the places of Scripture in which Israel is reproved and has evil attributed to it, the expression, "the haters of Israel," is substituted for Israel.' 'We read: Isaiah was punished, because he called Israel a people of unclean lips,' &c. Cf. S. and H., p. 249, and my Ephesians, p. 261.
[23] 1 Pet. iv. 6. 'The gospel was preached to' these 'dead men that they might be judged according to men in the flesh,' i.e. by perishing in the flood, 'but live according to God in the spirit,' i.e. through our Lord's preaching in Hades. There is, I think, so far, no ambiguity about this passage.
[24] Not, however, without regard to man's will to respond to the divine offer, see later, p. 82 ff.
[25] Mal. i. 2, 3. 'Was not Esau Jacob's brother? saith the Lord: yet I loved Jacob; but Esau I hated, and made his mountains a desolation, and gave his heritage to the jackals of the wilderness. Whereas Edom saith, We are beaten down, but we will return,' &c. This passage (1) plainly refers to Esau as meaning Edom, the people; (2) describes not the original lot of Esau, which was secondary indeed, but highly blessed (Gen. xxvii. 39, 40); but the ultimate lot of Esau when he had misused his original endowment in violence and cruelty.
But the obvious reply of the Jewish objector to St. Paul's assertion of the absolute and apparently arbitrary freedom of God's election is that it is unfair. It convicts God of unrighteousness. To this objection (ver. 14), which St. Paul deprecates with horror, he replies not by any large consideration of divine justice, but still by keeping the Jew to his own scriptures. The God revealed in scripture must be to the objector still the just God. He cannot call God unjust if His method as it now appears is that to which He called attention long ago. Look back, then, at the past records. Did God disclose Himself as bound to show mercy on Moses the Israelite, or to harden and judicially condemn Pharaoh the Egyptian? No, He declares to Moses His unrestricted freedom to exhibit His compassion on whom He will (Exod. xxxiii. 19). Men cannot by any choice or efforts of their own produce an exhibition of divine favour such as was shown to Moses the leader of Israel: the absolute initiative must come from God, and in taking that initiative He declares Himself absolutely free. In the same way God implicitly asserts His sovereign freedom when He brings Pharaoh out upon the stage of history as an example of the way in which He hardens men's hearts with a hardening which is the prelude to overthrow, that men all over the world may see and tremble at the divine power. It is not because Pharaoh is an Egyptian that he is hardened. He is hardened, as Moses has compassion shown him, simply because it is the will of God so to do in his case.
But the objector comes forward again (ver. 19): 'If this is the arbitrary method of God—if we are simply powerless puppets in the hands of an absolute and arbitrary will, to be saved or be destroyed—at any rate He has no reason to complain of us. If all the power is His, so is the responsibility.' Now St. Paul has it in his hand to show that there remains to man a very real power to retain his position, and consequently a very real responsibility and room for being blamed or praised: for if we cannot create our vocation, we can and we are required to correspond with it in a reverent and docile faith; and it was exactly here that the Jews had failed, in spite of all their prophets had taught them. But he keeps back this answer awhile, because he finds the attitude of such an objector toward God in itself so reprehensible. Such an one has not given consideration to what the relation of man to God really is—the creature to the creator. His critical, complaining attitude is nothing better than foolish.
Thus he takes his antagonist back upon the old prophetic metaphor of the potter and his clay, with which Isaiah and Jeremiah had rebuked the arrogance and impatience of men long ago: 'Shall the thing framed say of him that framed it, He hath no understanding; and shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it, What makest thou[1]?' He follows, however, most closely upon the later writer of the Book of Wisdom: 'For a potter, kneading soft earth, laboriously mouldeth each several vessel for our service: nay, out of the same clay doth fashion both the vessels that minister to clean uses, and those of a contrary sort. All in like manner; but what shall be the use of each vessel of either sort, the craftsman himself is the judge[2].' The thought was often in St. Paul's mind of the inequality of lots in the world and the Church. There are more and less honourable limbs in the body politic: there are vessels for honourable and vessels for dishonourable purposes in the great social economy[3]. So it is with the races of men. They are all of one blood—of the one lump. But some have high and others low vocations, and the right to determine of what sort the lot shall be in each case lies absolutely with the Divine Potter. It is childish to dispute His title. And not only so: when the potter, whom Jeremiah was ordered to observe, found a vessel he was making marred under his hand, 'he made it again another vessel, as seemed good to the potter to make it[4].' Accordingly, when the chosen material (i.e. the Jews) would not mould to the high purpose for which the Potter was fashioning it, who shall complain if He diverted it to lower uses or threw it away to destruction, and produced out of His stores other vessels which He had already prepared and destined for glorious functions (that is to say, the Gentile Christians)? But the case is even stronger than this. Who indeed shall complain if, when the vessels originally destined for the higher uses prove fit for nothing but destruction, the Divine Potter—though willing, now as in the case of Pharaoh, to let His wrath fall and to manifest His power—yet shows almost unlimited forbearance with them (as in fact God did with the Jews); and when at last He does let His wrath fall, only does so in order to manifest anew the resourcefulness of His mercy[5] upon a new and larger Israel, gathered not from among the Jews only, but from among all nations, to be the object of His compassionate regard?
Indeed, the prophet Hosea (ii. 23, i. 10) foresaw this choice of a yet unrecognized people to be God's people. Isaiah again (x. 22) anticipated no more than a remnant surviving of all the multitudes of Israel, because of the sharpness and conclusiveness of the divine judgement upon them. And (i. 9) it is only to the compassion of God that he attributes their exemption by means of the faithful remnant from entire annihilation, like that of the Cities of the Plain.
What shall we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God? God forbid. For he saith to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion. So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that hath mercy. For the scripture saith unto Pharaoh, For this very purpose did I raise thee up, that I might shew in thee my power, and that my name might be published abroad in all the earth. So then he hath mercy on whom he will, and whom he will he hardeneth.
Thou wilt say then unto me, Why doth he still find fault? For who withstandeth his will? Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why didst thou make me thus? Or hath not the potter a right over the clay, from the same lump to make one part a vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour? What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering vessels of wrath fitted unto destruction: and that he might make known the riches of his glory upon vessels of mercy, which he afore prepared unto glory, even us, whom he also called, not from the Jews only, but also from the Gentiles? As he saith also in Hosea,
I will call that my people, which was not my people;
And her beloved, which was not beloved.
And it shall be, that in the place where it was said
unto them, Ye are not my people,
There shall they be called sons of the living God.
And Isaiah crieth concerning Israel, If the number of the children of Israel be as the sand of the sea, it is the remnant that shall be saved: for the Lord will execute his word upon the earth, finishing it and cutting it short. And, as Isaiah hath said before,
Except the Lord of Sabaoth had left us a seed,
We had become as Sodom, and had been made like
unto Gomorrah.
What has been already said will have been enough to guard against the main sources of mistake in reading this section. St. Paul might have much to say about God's righteousness in general, and large ways of vindicating it. But here he holds fast to the single aspect of righteousness according to which it means that God has been true to the original principles of His covenant. The God who chose Abraham and Moses is the God who is now, and rightly on His own declared principles of government, rejecting the greater part of the people of Abraham and Moses. This—faithfulness to His own declared principles—is what St. Paul here means by His righteousness. And as it was God's declared principle to retain His own liberty to show mercy on men according to His free will, inside or outside the chosen people, so on the other hand He retained His liberty to exhibit His judgement of hardening according to His will inside or outside the chosen people. He who brought Pharaoh the Egyptian upon the stage of history[6], as an example of hardening judgement, is within His right in doing the same now with (the mass of) the people of His choice. The liberty asserted for God is wholly consistent with His being found, in fact, to have 'hardened' those only who have deserved hardening by their own wilfulness. It was for such a moral cause that God hardened the hearts of the Jews, that 'seeing they might not see, and hearing they might not hear[7].' We can feel no doubt that some similar moral cause underlay the hardening of Pharaoh. But this is not St. Paul's present point. All his argument is directed to asserting God's liberty to show mercy or harden, irrespectively of considerations of race, when and where He in His sovereign moral will chooses.
We should notice that St. Paul's method is here, as elsewhere, what is called ideal or abstract, in the sense that he makes abstraction of a particular point of view; and, apparently indifferent to being misunderstood, substantiates his argument upon the particular aspect which he has taken apart from the whole matter in hand, till it is done with, and then other points can be taken in their turn. And he does not, as a modern writer would do, painfully correlate the various aspects of the subject[8].
By means of the famous simile of the potter St. Paul asserts two principles about God: (1) that God is free, and condescends to give no account to His creatures, in absolutely determining the high or low vocations of men. To one man or nation He gives five talents, to another two, to another one. He makes vessels to honourable and vessels to (comparatively) dishonourable uses. He makes men Jews or Assyrians, Englishmen or Hottentots, at His absolute discretion. (2) That God is absolutely free, when the human material which He is moulding for His purposes proves intractable, to repudiate and reject what has, by its refusal to mould, become a 'vessel of wrath' fit 'to be taken and destroyed.' And it is only by a voluntary limitation of this freedom that He exhibits long toleration with the intractable and obstinate, and is longsuffering with them even when His wrath is ready and waiting to show itself. These are the two distinct points in the simile of the potter. We must distinguish carefully between the 'vessels destined for dishonour'—the 'less honourable limbs' of humanity—and the 'vessels of wrath,' or 'vessels fitted for destruction,' i.e. those which have proved themselves unfit for the vocation to which they were destined and have to be rejected. We note that St. Paul does not say that God fitted vessels for destruction, but that He bore long with those which had so become fitted. St. Paul never gives us any real justification—if we look at his language carefully—for the idea of any predestination to rejection, as distinct from predestination to higher or lower purposes. And the New Testament is full of assurances that a predestination to a low vocation in this world may be a predestination to high glory in eternity, if the humble calling is faithfully followed.