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3.6 - A History of Christianity in the Apostolic Age
The Christianity of Paul
Deliverance from a Body of Death
It is exceedingly significant that Paul does not ask for forgiveness, but for deliverance; and for deliverance, moreover, not from the penalty of sin, but from the source of sin. Paul was always thoroughgoing in his conception of sin and its effects. He never thought of death as a penalty arbitrarily inflicted upon the sinner by god, and which God therefore could remove; but he thought of it as the necessary and inevitable fruit of sin or corruption. That which is evil must perish.
Evil nature therefore must die. [Paul, indeed, dealt almost wholly in terms of nature rather than of personality and in real rather than legal conceptions. One cannot speak of inflicting punishment upon an evil nature except by an accommodation of terms. Only a conscious person can, strictly speaking, be punished. But an evil or corrupt nature must of necessity die.]
There was no way then to escape from death, except by escaping from the flesh whose condition doomed it to death. But how could a man escape from the flesh and live?
The common Jewish belief in the resurrection that was prevalent in Paul’s day afforded no answer to the question, for it was a belief in the resurrection of the flesh. Indeed, to the ordinary Hebrew mind, no life seemed possible except life in the flesh. But to rise again in the flesh, as Paul clearly saw, would be no blessing, but a curse.
To rise again in the flesh must seem to him, indeed, impossible, for the flesh is evil, and evil always means death. There was no way known to Paul, therefore, to escape from the flesh and live.
The struggle, through which he had been passing, a struggle to which his profoundly ethical nature had given a peculiar and awful intensity had culminated in utter despair. [That Romans 7:24 represents the condition of his mind in the days immediately preceding his conversion there can be no doubt; and it is possible that the unusual zeal with which he had recently been giving himself to the practice of religion, and the tremendous and restless energy with which he was devoting himself to the persecution of the Christians, may have been due in part to the inner struggle.]
In was while he was in the depths of that despair, that he saw the vision of the risen Jesus. The cardinal fact about it was that it was the vision of a spiritual being. It was not a man of flesh and blood that appeared to Paul, but a spirit; it was not an earthly but a heavenly apparition that he saw. [Cf. 2 Cor. 4:6; Gal. 1:16] And yet, Paul at once recognized that spirit as the risen Jesus. What must have been the effect of such recognition?
On the one hand, of course, the immediate conviction that Jesus was what he had claimed to be, the Messiah of God; on the other hand, the realization of the pregnant fact that this Messiah Jesus, though possessed, as a man, of the same flesh as other men [Cf. Gal. 4:4; Phil. 2:7, Rom. 8:3] had yet escaped death, and that he had escaped it in the very way that Paul had been driven to feel was the only way, by escaping the flesh itself. He had died a man in the flesh; he was now living the life of a glorified spirit.
But with his rigorous conception of sin and its consequences, it was clear to Paul that such continued spiritual existence presupposed a life of absolute holiness on the part of Jesus; [Cf. Rom. 5:18 sq.; 15:3; 2 Cor. 5:21; Phil 2:5 sq.] for had he been unholy, he could not have escaped the grasp o death [Rom. 5:12 sq., 21; 6:16,21; 7:13 sq.]
There must have been something in him then stronger than the flesh that could conquer and rise above it. But in that case he must have been more that an ordinary man; [For the belief that Jesus was more than human was furnished a suggestion in the idea, which was not altogether unknown among the Jews of Paul’s day, that the Messiah belonged to a higher order of being than man, that he had an existence in heaven before his appearance on earth, and that he was to be sent down thence by God to fulfill his Messianic calling. Whether Paul shared that belief before his conversion, we do not know; but he certainly held it afterwards (cf. Rom. 8:3; 1 Cor. 10:4; 2 Cor. 8:9; Phil. 2:6 sq.] for all men are sinners [Rom. 3:9 sq.; 5:12 sq.].
It seemed to Paul, indeed, that he must have been nothing less than a heavenly being endowed with the Spirit of God. [1 Cor. 15:47; Rom. 8:9 sq.] As such a being it was possible for him, as it was not possible for a mere man, to overcome the flesh, and to pass through death into a spiritual life released from the flesh, the life he had enjoyed with God before his incarnation. [Rom 1:4, 6:9 sq., 7:4, 8:9 sq.; 1 Cor. 15:15, 44, 49 sq.; Gal. 1:1; Phil. 2:8 sq., 3:21]
Used by permission of the publisher.
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