13. XI. This Principle Is Seen, but Cannot Be Proved
XI. This Principle Is Seen, but Cannot Be Proved That God is good, that He has made the Promise to the Hebrews and through them to the whole of mankind, was not a principle that Paul sought to prove by any ratiocination. He seems always to say to his audience, “You know it for yourselves”. In the perception that God is, there is also involved according to Paul’s view the perception that God is good. Only through a perversion of view can we imagine that God really exists without being good, for it is only through His gifts and goodness that we perceive His existence. From His works we know Him. This principle was burned into Paul’s nature by generations of experience. He was the heir to many centuries of Jewish history. None but a Jew could have had that perfectly firm and unhesitating grasp of this truth. The fabric of Paul’s thought is purely and simply Hebrew. Already before his birth he was marked out, first as Apostle, and secondly as Apostle to the nations, because the whole of Hebraism and all the results of Jewish wisdom and religious experience were interwoven in the constitution of his thought. He could not hesitate himself. He could not understand, nor sympathise with, nor pardon and make allowance for, any hesitation on the part of others. They must see. They must know. His own intense and unhesitating belief, the very fact that he could not allow any doubt, or seek to demonstrate to his hearers the axioms of the Faith, made him such a power among men. Had he been capable of feeling and of pardoning doubt, he might have been greater as a lecturer on abstract philosophic theory, but he could never have become such a power in the world as he was and is.
Here again Faith is the initial force which makes men recognise this truth. Faith is really a force that moves the minds of men. It is not a mere fact: it is a driving power. The failure to recognise this truth is already a mark of degeneration and degradation, i.e. of sin, which deteriorates and distorts the will. Paul estimates the sanity and the working power of men according to their ability to discern and believe the unseen. The Divine truth is not to be handled and weighed with common scales. It is appreciable through the natural power, granted to all men, to recognise the truth, and the natural tendency to follow it. This power is Faith, and by their possession of the power we must estimate men.
These may seem to be two very big assumptions. What right has Paul to take as the obvious and necessary principles of right thinking, these two axioms, that God is, and that God is good? Is that philosophically justifiable, or must we admit that after all Paul had not thought out a philosophic basis for his religion, and that the Greek form of thinking was in the last resort alien to him and lay outside of his circle of thought? The refusal to doubt the truth of one’s thought, however, is not necessarily a proof of an unphilosophic mind. The tendency to divest oneself of one’s thought, to hold it apart from oneself and contemplate and reason about it, and frame arguments to justify it, was discordant with Paul’s emotional and active nature. He found that this tendency became strong in his Hellenic Churches, as they were established. The purely philosophic mind was in danger of losing itself in abstract contemplation; and all the while there were the Greek cities, the Roman Provinces, the barbarian tribes, the whole world, to conquer, to convince and to save. Such abstract speculation was hateful to Paul. He saw in it the enemy taking a new form in his young Churches; and as this enemy grew more clearly defined he denounced it with the vehemence of his nature.
Those who regard the thoroughgoing denunciation of this kind in the Pastoral Epistles as un-Pauline miss a certain side of Paul’s nature. In those letters he does not refute, but simply sets aside as wrong and hateful and fatal all the heresies and false teaching to which he refers. In the case of a Church like Colossae, founded a few years ago by his coadjutors, or of the Galatian Churches, founded not long before by himself, he could in his letters regard their errors as due to a mistaken zeal for right. Especially was that the case with the Galatian converts: they were full of eagerness to do well: they were unsparing in exertion and in the observing of useless yet burdensome ceremonies. Their zeal had to be guided; and the way to guide them was to proclaim and explain more fully the Gospel with its knowledge now revealed, i.e. its mysteries and their meaning.
Later, however, in the letters to Timothy at Ephesus, another method was needed. It was vain to explain mysteries and revelation to those who were deliberately wasting the golden opportunities for making the resurrection known to the heathen and for saving the world, while they indulged in curious speculations about the nature of the resurrection and its time, and the meaning of time, and so on. Such people had already too much knowledge, or rather too much conceit of their knowledge. They did not need more knowledge, they wanted the whip and the rod. There is a fit time for all things, a time for the refutation of errors by the imparting of further knowledge, and a time for denunciation and flat condemnation. Just as Paul would have denounced the pagan hearer who declared that there was no God, and would have refused to argue where argument was vain and unprofitable, so in A.D. 66 he denounced the Ephesian Christians who theorised and allegorised and reasoned instead of acting. The Christian life, to Paul, lay not in contemplation but in work.
Such was Paul’s character. Is it inconsistent with a consciously thought out basis for his action? Is it unworthy of the mind that has passed through the philosophic stage, and gone on to the religious stage, and resolved to carry its religion to the world? This impulse to move the world was to Paul the essential nature of God and of the man who is made in the image of God. God exists to make and to perfect the world. The world is His creature, and He is the Creator: but a creator who creates nothing is a contradiction in terms. Equally self-contradictory and absurd is the creature that disregards its Creator and tries to ignore Him and to live without Him. Every breath that we draw is through the Divine power. Every thought that we think is through the Divine mind. Nothing is rightly understood except in its relation to that First Power: the world becomes real only as the envisagement of Him. If we refuse to recognise this, and if we turn away from God, we are reducing our own life to a negation; and we are turning from life towards death. There is no truth without this recognition of God: there is no real truth except this, that God is. Every other truth arises out of this in orderly evolution. That then is Paul’s position, and it is a perfectly sound philosophic position. As he says in Romans 11:36, “from Him and through Him and to Him are all things”.
It is of course implied in this that God is not real and existent apart from the world which He has created. It is His nature to concern Himself with His creation, to regulate it, to make it good. It is the true nature of man to have faith in the justice and goodness of God, and never to regard Him as malevolent or as careless of man. The pagan doctrine that God is cruel and must be soothed and propitiated, the philosophic doctrine that the gods live a life apart from and heedless of the world, are both equally abhorrent to the Hebrew belief and to Paul as a Hebrew sprung from Hebrews. In the nature of the real and true God it is also involved that He must be always in communication with the men whom He has created. They are not merely “from Him”: they are also “through Him”. In every act and thought and word of theirs pulses the Divine power, for they are made after His fashion. He must rule and guide His creatures. They have to attain the goal and return “to Him”. In doing so they realise His will and purpose. It is in accordance with the nature and consciousness of man that they must recognise that will in the process of realising it. To know it and to become conscious of it are equivalent to the working out of it in life. To know God’s purpose and will you must make that purpose your life: nothing merely abstract and inactive is real knowledge. You must live it before you can know it. This way of consciously living their knowledge comes only “through Him”: therefore the knowledge is communicated by Him to man. Once more the motive power lies in Faith. The intense belief, this mighty driving power, brings man into relation with God. Man knows with all his heart and might that God cares for His creatures, and that He cannot stand apart and leave them unaided to their own devices; He is constantly guiding men, and revealing Himself to them if they will only listen to His voice. Everything that takes place in the world around us, when rightly understood, is the expression of His will and the declaration of His character. All the powers of nature are His messengers, and “if He thunder by law, the thunder is still His voice”; but most true it is that (as the prophet of old found) the Lord was not in the wind, nor in the earthquake, nor in the fire, but in “a sound of gentle stillness”.
Paul was well aware that revelation of the Divine purpose may take place in many ways. In Acts 16:6-10 it is described as having been made to him three times in three different fashions. The characteristic of all such revelation is absolute certainty. When a man has heard the Divine voice, there is left no room for doubt. What he has heard or seen becomes a lasting possession and a power in his life. He sees the nature of the world and the permanent values of things in a new way, and he cannot acquiesce in his former valuation of them. In every case where a man, in what we might call a moment of inspiration or exaltation, seems to himself to appreciate more truly the nature of the world, his own relation to God and to other men, and the worthlessness of the things
Faith is the force that raises man above all hesitation regarding the goodness of God. If the experience of life instils a doubt, as the losses increase, as apparently purposeless and unmerited suffering obtrudes itself all around, as friends depart — the one penalty of growing old — and life grows grey in their absence, or if history appals us with its crimes and massacres and the ruin of great civilisations, what is Paul’s answer? Suffering is training and preparation: we must suffer that we may attain the glory of God: through Faith we have this assurance about the future: we must “suffer with Him, that we may be also glorified with Him: I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed towards us”.