Pauls Life

Saul the Persecutor.

So Saul was driven to persecute. Yet the goading of unsatisfied intuition did not cease. We may even suspect that Stephen's philosophy of Israel's history had made an impression on his confidence in his nation's religious authorities If mistaken before, why not again? This granted possible, all turned on the evidence as to the Resurrection of the crucified Prophet of Nazareth. The joyous mien of His followers, even when confronted with death, seemed to betoken a good con science before God. Yet Saul felt the status of the Law to be too grave an issue to depend on the probabilities of human testimony. So he plunged on, in devotion to what still seemed the cause of God against impugners of His Torah, but not with out his own doubts. He was, in fact, finding it "hard to kick against the goad" (Acts xxvi. 14) plied in his deeper conscious ness, as he followed his inherited beliefs. Still he was in the main honest (i Tim. i. 13), and his hindrances were exceptional. Direct personal experience on the point on which all hinged, the alleged divine vindication of Jesus as Messiah-elect, following on the legal condemnation by the national authorities, was needful to open up a clear exit from his religious impasse.

The Vision at Damascus.

It was at this critical point that, as he neared Damascus on a mission of persecution, there was granted him—as he believed ever after in the face of all challenge—a vision of Jesus, in risen and glorified humanity, as objective as those to the original witnesses with which in i Cor. xv. he classes it.

As to the sense in which this vision, so momentous in its issues, may be regarded as "objective," the following points deserve notice. On the one hand it is generally agreed (I) that Paul distinguished this appearance of the risen Jesus from his other "visions and revelations of the Lord," such as he refers to in 2 Cor. xii. I sqq., and classed it with those to the Twelve and others which first created the belief that Jesus had been "raised from the dead"; (2) that this belief included for Paul a trans formed or spiritualized body, his vision of which seems to colour his conception of the resurrection body generally (Phil. iii. 21), though he had certain traditional notions to start with ; cf. 2 Cor. v. I sqq. On the other hand, analogies furnished by religious psychology (e.g., the case of the Sadhu Sundar Singh), includ ing a sudden vision amid light and the hearing of a voice as ac companiments of a religious crisis, affect our ability to take Saul's consciousness in the matter as a simple transcript of objective facts. But beyond this physical concomitant of his vision we cannot go historically. After all, the main point for Paul's devel opment—as well as the basis of all theories of the vision—is the degree of discontinuity between his thought before and after the event. On this Paul is clear and emphatic, though the bearing of the modern discovery of the "unconscious" mental processes upon the fact must be left open.

Whatever was the nature of the vision, its spiritual content determined the course of his life. Jesus was, in spite of all, God's Messiah, His Righteous One, the type of true righteousness in man, through spiritual union with Whom like righteousness was to be attained, if at all. In a flash Saul's personal problem as to acceptance with God and victory over sin was changed. It be came simply a question how spiritual union with this Messiah was to come about. He had vanquished and "condemned sin in the

flesh" by His perfect obedience (Rom. viii. 3, v. 19), of which the Cross was now seen to be the crowning act. As for the Law as means of justification, it was superseded by the very fact that Messiah had realized His righteousness on another principle altogether than that of "works of the Law," and had in fact been crucified by its action. He had died to it as a dispensational principle. This meant that those united to Him by faith were themselves sharers in His death to the Law as master and judge, and so were quit of its claims in that new moral world into which they were raised as sharers also in His Resurrection (Rom. vi.

i. vii. 6). Henceforth they "lived unto God" in and through Messiah, by the self-same Spirit by which He had lived the sinless life (viii. 9). Here we have at once Paul's mysticism and his distinc tive gospel in germ.

The New Theory of the Law.

The old regime had dissolved. His first act was to make explicit, through confession and baptism, his submission and adhesion to Jesus as Messiah, implicit in his cry from the ground, "What shall I do, Lord?" Thereby he formally "washed away his sins" (Acts xxii. 16). Then he began boldly to proclaim in the synagogues of Damascus that Jesus, whose followers he had come to root out, was verily the Messianic Son of God (ix. 20; cf. Matt. xvi. 16). Yet ere long he felt the need for quiet in which to think out his new position. He with drew to some spot in the region south of Damascus, then vaguely called Arabia (Gal. i. 17). Chief among the problems pressing for reinterpretation in the light of his recent experience was the place of the Law in God's counsels. While the Law could warn and even restrain the sinner from overt sins, it could not redeem or save him from the love of sin. In a word, it could not "give life" (Gal. iii. 21). Hence its direct remedial action was quite secondary. Its primary effect, and therefore divine purpose, was to drive men humbly to seek something more, God's grace. It "shut up all unto (realized) disobedience, that God might have mercy upon all" (Rom. xi. 32; Gal. iii. 22). Thus the place of the Law in God's counsels was episodic. The radical egoism of the natural man could be transcended, and self-glorying excluded, not by the Law, with its "law (principle) of works," but by the "law of faith" (Rom. iii. 27). In fine, the function of the Law was secondary, preparatory, temporary. Its reign closed when its work in shutting up men to faith in and through Christ—the perfect form of faith—was accomplished. Its day was over when Jesus accepted crucifixion at its hands, and so passed on to inaugurate a new "Covenant" marked by a final relation be tween man and God, the filial, the Spirit of which was already in the hearts of Christian believers (Gal. iii. 23–iv. 7). Thus the Cross of Jesus satisfied the claims of Law as a dispensation or divinely sanctioned method, which had to be honoured even in the act of being transcended, "that God might be just (i.e., dis pensationally consistent), while justifying the believer in Jesus" on a fresh basis (Rom. iii. 26). Such a view did but "establish the Law" (v. 31) within its own sphere, while pointing beyond it to one in which its aim, real obedience, found fulfilment.