25. XXIII. Righteousness and Sin

XXIII. Righteousness and Sin As Paul was filled with an intense, flaming passion for righteousness, so he was filled with an equally intense hatred for sin. The life of man is to him quite as much a struggle to get free from sin, as it is a growing into the righteousness of God. The form in which the power of sin most clearly manifested itself in the Pauline world was idolatry. This he hated with all the strength of his nature, not merely because idolatry was a philosophic error regarding the nature of God, but because through that error it started mankind on the wrong course towards bad and harmful ends, and became thus the cause of numberless errors and sins. A merely speculative and abstract error about the nature of God might conceivably remain an error in word, not in power, and, if this were so, it need not be very seriously considered; just as a philosophic truth, if it remains abstract and theoretical, a matter of word and not of power, may exert no practical influence and earn no commendation from Paul. But in idolatry the false conception of the Divine nature has become active and misleading, and makes itself a terrible power among men. On this account Paul hated it and fought against it all his life. He had lived amid idolatry. He knew its nature, its power, and its effect. (See also Section II on this subject.)

Sin is a force acting on man’s nature, which expresses itself in the deterioration of the individual, and which steadily becomes stronger and more dominant in him. At every step that man takes backwards towards degradation and death, he becomes weaker and less fitted to resist the power of sin that rules him. His nature grows more and more corrupt. His will loses tone, and becomes enslaved to the passions or caprices of the moment.

Moreover, the power of sin increases, not merely in the individual, but in the family and the race. The stern old Hebrew principle that the iniquity of the father is visited upon the children is only an aspect of this domination of sin. The race deteriorates: the family grows weaker and poorer, and dies out: society and the pressure which it exerts on the individual turn towards evil.

All these statements require to be more carefully scrutinised in detail.

Righteousness consists in, and is perfected through, the approach of man nearer and nearer to God. The word “approach” must not be misinterpreted or misapplied. It must be taken as an expression of spiritual truth, not of local character. God is not in one place more than in another. We do not go to any special point or place in order to find Him there. Place is a term of limitation, and can be applied to the illimitable and the infinite only because we have to use the limited ideas and terms of finite existence for want of more appropriate and correct words. Man approaches to God only in the approximation of his spirit and nature to the spirit and nature of God. He is transformed into the same image from glory to glory; and as Professor H. A. A. Kennedy says, (St. Paul on the Last Things, p. 294.) the likeness is not mere outward appearance, for to Paul the term “image” means appearance that “rests on identity of character, community of being”.

Sin, as the contrary idea to righteousness, consists in the movement of man away from God, that is to say, in the increasing divergence of his spirit from that of God, and the increasing opposition between his nature and the nature of God. It is not simply a definite, unchanging fact; it is a process; and its character is to become accelerated as it continues.

Moreover, sin is not merely a process; it is also a force, and it becomes in itself a power ever growing stronger and stronger to draw man away from God. That this is so is evident from the situation of man in relation to God and to the universe. Man is placed in the difficulty of having to re-attain to God. The difficulty is there to be overcome; and through overcoming it the Divine element in man is strengthened, and he grows in likeness to God. The difficulty constitutes the opportunity. Only through the possibility of a choice does man learn to exercise his power of choosing the right and rejecting the evil. Thereby his nature is strengthened, and he attains towards real freedom of will. In the strengthening of his will he is strengthening the Divine nature within him. The will of God is that man should do good; and the will or the spirit of God acts in man to make him choose the good.

Thus, on the one hand, it is true to say that the evil in the world exists in order to give man the opportunity of overcoming it and attaining to God. The evil is in this view the measure of man’s separation from God; and human life well lived is the traversing of this intervening distance. Without evil there cannot be the human part of the universe, for unless the human is separated from the Divine, there would be no humanity and no cognisable universe. From this point of view, then, evil is mere negation, formless and empty distance between man and God. It is the condition of the act of creation; now the nature of God is to create, and without interposing the distance that separates Himself from man He could not create this universe.

Yet, on the other hand, evil which is not overcome is thereby made active. If the will of the man fails and is not strengthened by achievement, it does not remain as before, but is weakened. The nature of the man thus becomes less like the nature of God; the distance by which he is separated from God is widened; and his energy for work in the future is diminished. The widening gap that intervenes between him and God, the loss of sympathy with and desire to attain to God, becomes a power to dominate and enslave his will and control his action. The opportunity which is missed, the possibility of right choice which is not used, leaves behind the omission an inheritance of increased inability to face and overcome the difficulties of the world. Being now less like God, and being further separated from God, through the growth of weakness and idleness, sluggishness and inactivity, man loses some portion of his original endowment and power of comprehending God and good. Such an endowment man possessed in the beginning: (See also Section X.) what can be known about God was clear at first in his mind and judgment, for this power was the original gift of God to man. (Romans 1:19.) He loses it by not exercising it; it is clouded and distorted, and the intelligence is darkened. From all this there result error and misconception of the nature of God; and thus comes idolatry. The form of idolatry which was most familiar to Paul and to his readers was the representation of the incorruptible God after the image and likeness of corruptible man (as especially among the Greeks), or of birds and quadrupeds (as especially among the Egyptians), and serpents (as was common everywhere). (Romans 1:23.) Instead of contemplating the Divine power as it is in its reality, men invented these foolish forms, trying by human skill to compensate for their gradual loss of ability to see God, who was now further removed from them.

It is involved in Paul’s view, and this was his inheritance from the ancient and characteristic Hebrew conception, that man degenerates through error; and that man’s earliest religious ideas are not so wrong and false as his later conceptions. Backsliding goes on steadily, when it has once set in. In other words, the savage man of the present day is not the primitive man, but an advanced stage of degradation; and idolatry in the Greek or the Egyptian or other pagan forms is the result also of degradation from an earlier simplicity, which had not been so far removed from the truth as the modern savage is. This Pauline doctrine is not admitted by recent speculations regarding the history of religion and the growth of mythology. On the contrary, it is a postulate assumed by almost all investigators, that the history of religion is a history of continuous progress. It is not part of our purpose to defend Paul’s teaching (for it can defend itself), nor yet to compare it with modern speculative theories; but it is involved in my design to show that his teaching is reasonable and consistent with modern philosophic views. To do so fully would lead us too far afield at present, because it would require a complete study of comparative religion and comparative sociology from an unfashionable point of view.

There are, however, two or three points that can be stated briefly without fear of contradiction. There is, for example, no possibility of disputing the fact that extreme polytheism is a later development alike in Greece and in Egypt: so much is admitted universally. Behind that extreme polytheism, as it was current in the time of Paul, there lay in many cases the simpler and older religion of the common man — not the philosopher who sought and invented a highly philosophic explanation of polytheism, but the uneducated rustic. This common man was often content to reverence “the God,” to be guided by some vague perception of the will of “the God,” to make vows and prayers to “the God,” and to record a confession of his failure to act according to the will and ritual of “the God”. The ideas and actions of the common man were false and bad in many respects; his training and surroundings from childhood had been calculated to turn his conduct into wrong grooves; but at least his views continued to be in many respects the simple issue of his native intuition, of his intercourse with the phenomena of nature, and of his daily contemplation of those eternal witnesses, the sun and the sky. The deep things of God, the invisible things of God, His everlasting power and Divine nature, (Romans 1:20.) were only to a small degree within the ken of the common man; but he had the beginning of knowledge in his heart, and he had received too little education to lose hold of the simple beginnings, though he had been trained to misapply these initial conceptions. In the second place, the modern savage is in some and even in many cases found dwelling amid the remains of a higher civilisation. His world and his society have degenerated around him, and his habits and thoughts in maturity are the product of a long degradation. This situation sets in strong relief the truth of Paul’s other opinion, derived from his old Hebrew training, that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children. This is a scientific fact of the highest importance. All educated men are now alive to it. All are seeking to find some way to elude it, or to minimise the evils that arise through it. Something, as we think and hope, could be done to give the children a fairer start, and a more even chance in life; but how ineffective have our efforts been as yet, and how powerless has European civilisation proved to save the children from the consequences of their fathers’ guilt. The stream of life does indeed purify itself as it runs; the punishment of the children in the old Hebrew doctrine lasts to the third and fourth generation; but there are certain causes and consequences that last longer and cause a permanent deterioration of society, or even (as physicians say) poison the springs of life at its source.

Sin cannot be localised or confined to one individual in the succession of the generations. We all suffer through the sins of our parents, and we all transmit the consequence of sin to following generations. Racial guilt is a real and powerful force. The Hebrew teaching is fully justified by experience and science; and Paul, who assumed its truth, was right. In short, a good life consists in the overcoming of difficulties. Such is the law of nature, or, in other words, the will of God. A difficulty or trial which is not overcome gives an opening to sin: it is the triumph of inertia in the character of the man who fails to do well: his nature ceases to grow, and slips back to weakness and degeneration: the Divine element in him fails and is dulled, whereas by conquering difficulties it would grow stronger and brighter. The progressive development of man, the realisation of “the chief end of man,” consists in that strengthening of the Divine within him, in the raising it through the stages of life from glory to glory, in the growing sympathy with the place and work of God in the world, and in the consequent identification of one’s personal happiness with the life and triumph of the Divine will. On the contrary, the force of inertia does not remain constant under failure, but is increased. From being a mere hindrance, it grows into a power actively working on the nature of the man, encouraging his self-conceit, (Romans 1:21.) making him more and more selfish and self-centred. He expels from his mind all sense of the Divine around him and above him; and thus he loses the desire to attain to God, and makes his own pleasure or success the end and aim of his life. He substitutes for the true God his own conception of what God is. In ancient times and among uneducated races, he expressed his conception in some external and visible form or symbol; and thus arose the kind of paganism with which Paul was familiar in the Graeco-Roman world. In more educated races, the false conception of God remains an ideal of some kind, and is special to the individual mind. Such ideals may be and often are of a comparatively lofty order, and the life which aims at realising such great ideals partakes of the nobility of its object. The nobler the ideal, the nearer does it approach the nature of the true God, and the more does the life which strives towards this ideal approximate towards the life of the seeker after God. Yet there remains always a certain manifest difference, for the created ideal, lofty as it may be, partakes of the mind which has created it; and the man who seeks after it is not aiming at an object above himself, but is satisfied with the expression of himself The lower kind of paganism, such as St. Paul knew, externalised its own conception of God in a visible form, which appealed to others, and was almost always common to a whole race, or a tribe, or an association. Along with it there invariably grew up a formal cult and ritual (from which the individual ideal of the higher paganism generally remains free), because the veneration which is common to a number of persons must frame for its expression a series of actions which are incumbent on all as symbolical of the common purpose. With the ritual grows up a body of priests, who know the series of prescribed actions and guide the conduct of ignorant devotees. The passions, the ignorance, the vices and the failings of the multitude, mould the customary ritual, and express themselves in it. The history of paganism, therefore, always becomes a racial degeneration; because paganism is in its nature human and erroneous, and does not seek after the ideal of the true God.