19. XVII. Life Is Growth

XVII. Life Is Growth

If we try to put this idea in the simplest and barest form, man, as he is placed in this world, must either move onward towards the better, or degenerate towards the worse. He cannot stand still. He cannot remain the same, as if he were fixed and unchanging. In the flux of the world, nothing can continue fixed and permanent. Movement towards the better is movement towards God and towards life: in fact, it is in itself really and actually life. Movement towards the worse is degeneration and is already death. In Paul’s thought degeneration and death are equivalents.

Now without some power to move him, man degenerates, and thus comes death. A motive power is needed to start him and keep him on the upward path to the better; and this motive power Paul found in faith, the belief in an ideal, the belief in the existence of something higher, and in the possibility of reaching it (which implies the wish to reach it). There is no other force sufficient. Everything else has failed, as the history of man shows.

Thus faith is the power that sets man moving in the right direction; but this is not an external power; it is a power that works in and through the mind of the man. It is the Divine power, and yet it resides in the human mind, because it is the Divine fire in the nature of man. This is a difficult idea, for it seems to involve the contradiction that without external aid man must fail, and yet that he succeeds through a power within himself. Each statement can be made with perfect truth, contradictory as they appear. At every point in the life of man, you find yourself involved in a similar apparent contradiction: you can at every point say, as Paul says here, this is and this is not: he has attained and he has not yet attained. This lies in the nature of growth: at every moment that which is growing ceases to be what it has been; it does not remain the same for two consecutive moments; but the change is not merely purposeless or vague or shifting, it is change controlled by a law and a purpose; and this law of development is the Divine element amid the ceaseless variation.

Thus I find myself driven to assert that Paul is the preacher of development and growth, and that only from this point of view can we at the present day put a meaning on his teaching which is thinkable by people in the special stage of thought on which we now stand, advanced beyond the past, but still very far from perfect. The teaching of Paul, i.e. the mind of Christ, seems to assume, in every age and to every person, a form peculiarly adapted and sufficient for the occasion. It has to be rethought (as was said in the outset) by every one for his own purpose to suit his own need. It is perfectly infinite in its suitability; but each man must see it for himself, and each thinks that he sees something special to himself The variety, however, lies, not in the teaching of Paul, but in the nature of men, who contemplate it through the colouring medium of their own various character.

Whether I have succeeded in making clear my reasons, I know not; but I find myself compelled to begin afresh and to approach the whole problem from another point of view. To Paul human conduct is a problem of growth: it is dynamic, not static. In this view everything is seen in a new light. Righteousness is not a state, but a process of growing or approaching towards the nature of God. Sin is not simply a fact or a characteristic, definite and stationary; sin is a process of degeneration and deterioration, continuously accelerated, and gathering increased momentum. The sinner is a person driven down a hill; his velocity is constantly accelerated; and it becomes more and more difficult for him to stop his course or to turn back. Yet to turn back is necessary if he is to begin to move towards righteousness. Some tremendous power must be brought into play to arrest the impetus of the degeneration towards evil, and cause a movement in the opposite direction towards good and God.

Life means the fulfilment of the purpose of one’s existence: to fail and to frustrate that purpose is death. “Sin entered into the world, and death through sin.” (Romans 5:12.) The double statement is put most emphatically in the form: “The wages of sin is death; but the free gift of God is eternal life”. (Romans 6:23.) Such is the order of God: “whether (servants) of sin unto death or of obedience (to His will) unto righteousness”. (Ibid., 16.) Righteousness and life are here practically convertible terms; and these sentences would be equally true and equally intelligible, if the words were interchanged. The question has been asked and seriously discussed whether Paul would have gone so far as to maintain that, if there had been no sin, there would never have been in the world such a thing as death. This is one of those academic questions with which Paul would have had little patience. If the world, and the Divinely ordained course of the world, had been different from what they are, then many things else would have been different. It is profitless, and worse than profitless, to discuss such questions. They approximate perilously to the logomachies against which Paul fulminates in writing to Timothy and Titus. When death is conceived as the transition of force from one form to another, it has a different meaning from the other sense, in which it is spoken of as the equivalent of sin. In the latter case it is really degeneration, in which every right feeling, right judgment, and right impulse, gradually become atrophied and cease to exist. The man who fails to carry into effect the Divine purpose of his being is ceasing to live; and when all hope is lost he is dead. The common metaphor by which we speak of such a man as dead originates from a true instinct. After all, even in the physical sense, how difficult it is to predicate death as final and absolute. In the case of drowning, a person may be practically dead; and yet sometimes, after hours of therapeutic work, the breath may be recalled; and all that can be said is that he would have been pronounced dead hours before, if it had not afterwards been proved that he could still live. I know the circumstances of a case in which a man was pronounced dead by some of the best physicians in Europe after typhoid fever; and yet was brought back to life after many hours of effort by non-medical belief and activity. Still more difficult is it to predicate moral death. There are admittedly many cases in which a person who had seemed utterly dead to all moral feelings and hopelessly lost, has been restored to life. He was really dead; and yet, after all, there is no moral death so absolute and complete as to be beyond the redeeming power of faith and of Christ.

All the issues of life and death are under the power of God and subject to His control.